Управляемая сыном Кириенко VK хочет создать Национальную новостную платформу на базе агрегатора «Дзен» (который теперь принадлежит компании). По задумке, все маркетплейсы, отечественные соцсети, видеохостинги, поисковики и порталы с объявлениями должны будут в обязательном порядке разместить виджет с топ-5 новостями на главной странице сайта или приложения. Отбирать эти новости будет правительство — охватить хотят сервисы с ежедневной активной аудиторией свыше 5 млн человек. Ради того, чтобы заставить россиян читать госпропаганду, VK даже внесёт законодательные поправки в Госдуму. Авторы инициативы считают, что упавшие охваты прокремлевских СМИ так вырастут в три раза.
Kevin Williamson is a hard right cultural critic of long standing, who for many years was part of the National Review cartel. He’s best known in progressive circles I suppose for getting fired from the Atlantic a few months into his brief tenure there, after it was discovered that he had apparently advocated hanging as an appropriate punishment for getting an abortion. (He later claimed this was all one of those thought experiment thingees, and that he didn’t even like capital punishment generally, so seriously not literally or whatever).
The point here is that he’s the opposite of a centrist squish, nor is he to the best of my knowledge one of those extreme right wingers who have turned against Trump since the Iran debacle only because they’re anti-Semitic loons.
The Iranians do not have very many advantages in the war the United States has launched on them, but they do have a few. One is a willingness to suffer and die and to pay economic costs that evidently exceeds the present American capacity for such sacrifice; the second, unexpected though the fact may be, is a critical edge in the matter of political intelligence: Washington has consistently misunderstood the nature of the ayatollahs’ regime in Tehran for going on 50 years now, but the Iranians seem to have a reasonably good handle on the character of the current U.S. administration.
For lo these many years, I have been advising observers not to make the mistake of overcomplicating Donald Trump. The ayatollahs, of all people, seem to have got to the core of the issue before most American political commentators.
Trump describes himself (and his admirers describe him) as pragmatic, a man of common sense, which is the nice way of saying that he is a man without principles or fixed moral commitments, and even the single limited virtue to which he occasionally pays tribute is a one-way street: Loyalty to Trump is all-important, but loyalty from Trump—ask Mrs. Trump or Mrs. Trump or Mrs. Trump about that. Some simple men are saints and may be most easily understood in terms of their saintly virtues: St. Francis was good and gentle because he was good and gentle. Trump is the mirror image of the simple saint: He’s a simple man whose actions are most directly and accurately described as the ordinary daily application of his vices: laziness, vindictiveness, greed, vanity, arrogance, cowardice, and, above all, stupidity. He is a rage-addled dimwit with a savantic gift for manipulating lesser fools and a vulnerability to manipulation by men who are similarly vicious but more capable: Vladimir Putin, J.D. Vance, Stephen Miller, even one or two of his idiot children. Stronger men can push him around, and weaker men succeed by flattering him. His enemies can manipulate him at least as easily as his allies.
That is why Salena Zito got it wrong in her famous aphorism about taking Trump seriously rather than literally: As strange as it is to say about a man who notionally controls a nuclear arsenal sufficient to obliterate all known sentient life in this universe, it is impossible to take him seriously as a man or as a political force. Trump is serious in the sense that one may take a brain tumor as a serious thing but not a thing you’d have an argument with or lose a chess match to.
Trump’s escalating threats against Iran leapt very quickly from mere war crimes (targeting civilian infrastructure) to outright genocide (“a whole civilization will die tonight”), and the bosses in Tehran ran that through their Trump decoder rings to reveal the true message: “I am terrified by the closing of the Strait of Hormuz and have no idea how to get myself out of this mess.”
Tehran took him up on his ceasefire talk not because the ayatollahs were cowed by his imbecilic threats but because a ceasefire works to their advantage and costs them, for the moment, nothing. They put out that risible ceasefire framework—under which the United States would pay them reparations and remove its forces from the Middle East, along with other demands that were one brandy snifter full of M&Ms short of a 1980s Van Halen tour rider—knowing that Trump would have to swallow the insult and pretend that there were some other sort of negotiation under way when there isn’t.
Of course Trump went for that. To whom could he turn for advice? Secretary of State Marco Rubio is an oleaginous little sycophant, and he probably is the best of the lot, standing head and shoulders above Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a Fox News clown whose great achievement so far has been to avoid appearing obviously drunk on the job. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is a conspiracy kook and Putinist who is so wildly incompetent that even Trump seems to have noticed; Deputy National Security Adviser Robert Gabriel Jr.’s great qualification for the post is having been a producer on Laura Ingraham’s insipid talk show.
Little wonder, then, that the Iranians do not seem to take Trump seriously.
The Iranians take American bombs and missiles seriously, but—unlike many Americans—they seem to understand that the relevant objectives for the United States in this conflict are political rather than military. The U.S. military did not need to demonstrate that it could, under orders, massacre Iranians on the ground or in the air (or in girls’ schools) as easily as American forces recently massacred boatloads of seagoing civilians in the Caribbean on the thinnest of pretexts. That the U.S. government is able to achieve its desired military outcome in any conventional confrontation with any military anywhere in the world is understood and hardly contested, as much as a frank admission of the fact would bruise the pride of a few old men in Beijing. When it comes to killing people and destroying property, the United States has no equal in the world unless someone somewhere decides to get froggy with the nukes—that is one reason (not the only one) the Iranians are keen to possess nuclear weapons.
But as to securing the desired political outcome—Washington’s record is less impressive as seen from the point of view of Pyongyang, Hanoi, Baghdad, and Tripoli, and, no doubt, from Moscow and Beijing.
And so it is in Tehran.
Children, as Epictetus observed, play at being one thing and then another and then another, and the unserious man “will behave like children who sometimes play like wrestlers, sometimes gladiators, sometimes blow a trumpet, and sometimes act a tragedy when they have seen and admired these shows.” His advice to the would-be philosopher, applicable to any citizen who would take on real responsibility: “Do not, like children, be sometimes a philosopher, then a publican, then an orator, and then one of Caesar’s officers. These things are not consistent. You must be one man, either good or bad. You must cultivate either your own ruling faculty or be dominated by external things.”
Trump is famously dominated by external forces—by the last person who had his ear, by the last thing he saw on Fox News or heard from radio commentator Mark Levin. Lacking a moral center or intellectual ability, Trump can campaign for a Nobel Peace Prize one day and threaten the overnight extermination of a civilization the next without being very serious about either project. He is not serious in the way George H.W. Bush or Helmut Kohl or Margaret Thatcher were serious—he is serious in the way cancer is.
As serious as a heart attack, as the saying goes, but more predictable.
And so while our forces can bomb Iran into rubble and then make the rubble bounce, that will not be enough to win. Winning in Iran is a political project, one that requires intelligence, imagination, and courage, qualities that Donald Trump does not possess. Perhaps he could borrow some, in case anyone around him had any to spare and assuming that the president would recognize these commodities in the unlikely case they were presented to him.
I see no lies here.
That Trump is an imbecile, a complete moral void, and as manipulable as a small child are all the most obvious truths in the world, but not so obvious that they don’t bear repeating constantly, from every point on the ideological spectrum.
That the entire Republican party is under the complete unchallenged domination of such a man suggests some other truths that I certainly don’t expect Kevin Williamson et al to ever consider, but for the present anti-Trumpism needs all the frenemies it can use.
* Проблема со мной такая: когда я вижу чей-то пост, или просто читаю/смотрю рекомендацию какого-нибудь кина, я иду искать где скачать, ставлю на закачку и сразу же на паузу. На закачку – чтобы не забыть, а на паузу – потому что ну диск не резиновый, в очередь, сукины.
Так вот, пока дойдёт до скачивания, а это могут быть и месяцы, я уже не помню, кто мне порекомендовал это изделие, и куда ниндзей-экзекуторов высылать – неясно. В последнее время, надеюсь временно, со временем у меня херово, и это не значит что зато с деньгами заебись, нет, я умею так, что херово и с тем, и с этим. Кто тоже хочет так научиться – курсы платные. Обращайтесь.
Да, так вот – со временем херово настолько, что обещал одному товарищу дать список польских фильмов аж перед новым годом, и так до сих пор не нашёл возможности добраться до того компа, где они у меня хранятся.
Но невзирая на дефицит времени, я тут заглянул в фильм Ансынкабл, и вот – сижу, думаю, а на хуя я это сделал, и не лучше ли было занять это время чем-нибудь более содержательным: ну хоть в носу наконец всласть пальцем наковыряться.
Некий поц принял ислам. Не знаю, от коня или на хуя, но принял. И – why am I not surprised?? – заложил в трёх городах Америки ядерные взрывные устройства с часовыми механизмами. В фильме они названы бомбами, но я протестую: я вырос на том, что бомбы скидываются с самолётов, а то, что устанавливают на земле – это мины. Возможно, я неправ, но курва привычка ж вторая. Сделав это нехорошее дело, он немного волнуясь записал видеообращение. Куда-то он это обращение послал, и попёрся в торговый центр, где встал в маске прям напротив камеры и давай стоять. Стоял полчаса, пока его удосужились завинтить. Настойчиво стоял. Но в Америке, малыш, кто понял жизнь, тот не торопится.
Зачем он сделал так, чтоб его завинтили, я не понял. Возможно, затем, чтобы у этого фильма появилась внутренняя логика, хотя как по мне, так её в результате только убавилось.
А может, он был в душе индеец. А про индейцев я однажды читал историю, как племя Б поймало и пленило воина из племени А. Особой вражды между племенами не было, но воина всё равно решили убить. Поскольку зла на него никто не держал, то его решили перед смертью какое-то время пытать. Ну чтобы он мог умереть достойно, как мужчина, и чтоб рассказы о его стойкости перед болью можно было бы потом долго рассказывать у костра, и на его примере учились бы дети.
В общем, винтили его одни, а информация что он террорюга была у других, и пока всё это как-то утряслось, и он попал к тем, к кому он попасть целился, прошло ещё какое-то время. До взрыва оставалось всего ничего, несколько дней.
В общем, фильм гавно, но тем, кто любит делать диванно-моральный выбор – само то. Я не люблю, я свои выборы давно сделал, какие на диване, а какие и в полях. Не моё кино. тьфу.
Companion (5.0) - посмотрел фильм по рекомендации братца Залупина. Фильм не задел ничуть, несмотря на все сценаристские уловки авторов фильма. Конечно, можно говорить про усиливающуюся роль роботов в нашей жизни, но пока что все это остается в сфере фантастики. И фантастика в этом фильме несильно получилась, как мне кажется.
Flee (3.5) - взрослый полнометражный мультик воспоминаний человека, сидящего в кресле психотерапевта. Воспоминания этого афганца содержат все шаги членов его семьи для нелегального въезда в страны Европы и попыток легализации там.
In a Better World (6.5) - жизнь двух датских семей с тинэйджерами-подростками, над одним из которых издевается школьная "мафия". Второй подросток приходит к нему на помощь, избив главу "мафии" велосипедным насосом. Беда в том, что у защитника от рака умерла мать, а отец вовлечен в длительные командировки в Лондон. Все это приводит его сына в бешенство, которое временами выливается в криминальные поступки. А родители второго separated, поскольку отец, работая доктором, вовлечен в организацию "Врачи без границ" и почти все время проводит в Африке. В результате и этот пацан практически не видит своего отца.
Nowhere in Africa (7.0) - всем фильм понравился, кроме одного - любящая жена в постоянном режиме отказывалась переезжать с мужем куда-либо в новое место. Зато после она опять-таки отказывалась переезжать уже из этого места. Такая вот любовь. Что же до фильма, так в нем повествуется о еврейской семье, которая успела в последний момент выскочить из гитлеровской Германии и переехать в Кению, которая в тот момент была "английской". Интересен факт того, что в какой-то момент войны в Кении всех живших там немцев англичане переселили в лагеря интернированных. Правда, в отличие от концлагерей, эти были просто - отель пять звезд.
Revanche (7.0) - немецкий фильм о украинской беженке-проститутке, которая все собирается бросить это занятие, но, поскольку она должна боссу 30,000 долларов, то бросить все у нее не получается. Но у нее есть бойфренд, по совместительству шофер босса, который хочет как-то заработать 80,000 евро, чтобы вступить в долю с другом в начинающемся бизнес проекте. Поскольку заработать такие бабки у него не выходит, он решает ограбить банк. Вот тут-то все и закручивается...
The Apostle (7.0) - материал фильма совершенно не мой, но сыграл Роберт Дювал на отлично, правда Оскар тогда ему не достался - его перебил Николсон в "As Good As It Gets".
Tsotsi (6.0) - психопат из Южной Африки, живущий в Йоханнесбурге, пыжится стать главой небольшой банды, в связи с чем совершает кучу преступлений, включая угон автомобиля, совмещенный с расстрелом владельницы. Но на беду этого героя в автомобиле оказывается грудничок, который изменяет жизнь этого главного героя. Фильм - победитель иностранного Оскара в 2006 году.
Running this blog all this time has had various impacts on my psyche. I wouldn't say all of the effects have been good! But early on I did learn that plenty of people who were umambiguously "smarter" than me read my blog, and that literally everyone who read my blog was "smarter" (knew more, etc.) about something!
I'm not a supergenius and there are plenty of things I don't know much about.
I don't know how idiots like this get so confident that they are supergeniuses.
“Some of the studies are testing new treatment regimens for drug- resistant tuberculosis,” I explained, hoping I could convey the very real danger in terms that would register with this audience. “Thousands of enrolled patients are at risk now that their lifesaving treatment is stopped. But that’s not the only danger. We only have limited options to treat drug- resistant TB. We’re using our antibiotics of last resort in these trials. Interrupting treatment midstream risks the development of new, even more drug-resistant strains that could be untreatable. For an airborne infectious disease, that is a serious national security risk.”
Adam thought for a moment and then responded, noting that the political appointees at USAID were “not health people.” It would be hard, he surmised, for nonexperts to understand this issue. And so he suggested that we draft a simple, “Barney-style” set of slides to help the political leadership grasp the dangers, referring to the purple dinosaur of children’s television. He recommended that we use the term “Super TB” instead of “drug- resistant TB” to describe the mutations that can develop when treatment is interrupted, because it might be more likely to “catch their attention.”
Adam then made clear that he did not count himself among those po- litical appointees who were not health experts. Though he had no relevant training or experience, he reassured me that he understood the severity of infectious diseases, noting that he had recently read a book about smallpox. Apparently he had watched movies as well.
“One thing I thought of while you were talking,” he added, gesticulating wildly with his hands to conjure the image in his mind. “If you can make one of those maps like they have in Outbreak, where it shows the red growing over time as the disease spreads? You know, like the zombie apocalypse? That would be great, very effective.”
The thought that Adam might have the most health expertise of anyone in the agency’s leadership made me shudder.
Excerpt fromInto the Wood Chipper: A Whistleblower's Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID.
В недавней записи, когда я предложил определение "слоп - это то, что занимает больше человеческого времени потребить, чем заняло человеческого времени создать", многие читатели меня не поняли, судя по возражениям. Я имел в виду в первую очередь тексты, и "время потребления" тут просто время, нужное для прочтения текста, одним человеком, а не всеми читателями вместе. Наверное, можно найти исключения (очень медленных читателей и очень быстрых писателей), но если за ними специально не охотиться, ясно, что обычно автор книги, диссертации, эссе, статьи или просто поста в соц. сетях вкладывает больше времени на то, чтобы обдумать, записать, отредактировать, чем читатель - на то, чтобы прочитать.
Когда же созидание отдается на откуп ИИ, а "автор" только дает промпт, примерную идею, приблизительный набросок итп., то обычно по затратам времени все выходит наоборот - и это чувствуется, и оправдывает на мой взгляд название "слоп". Это не включает в себя случаи, когда автор использует ИИ как подспорье, но внимательно изучает каждое слово результата и редактирует по своему усмотрению, приводит к своему стилю.
В последнее время в лентах, которые я читаю в соц. сетях, все чаще авторы переходят на роль поставщиков промптов, а посты их на самом деле пишет ИИ. Только за последние недели 4-5 таких случаев заметил.
Возможно, сами авторы не понимают, насколько это заметно (пока еще! - кто знает, что будет с моделями через полгода или год?) и какое сильное ощущение кринжа вызывает. Так вот, это очень заметно любому, кто читает много текстов и много имеет дела с ИИ. Дело не только в поверхностных маркерах типа пресловутого тире или конструкций "это не про... это про..." Структура аргумента, разбитие на абзацы и предложения, определенная попсовая упругость стиля - не всегда легко объяснить это словами, но чувствуется сразу. И это оставляет очень плохое ощущение.
Не делайте так. Это не ваши слова, и если вам кажется, что это ваши мысли - вы обманываете себя. Может, не все сразу, постепенно, но читатели, которые читают ваш блог/дневник/фейсбук/микроблог/что угодно, потому что именно ваша мысль, ваш стиль, ваш юмор им был по душе, почувствуют этот песок на зубах. То, во что вы вложили лишь ничтожную часть себя, если вообще - будет оценено соответственно. Не надо.
Ну, вот уже и православный мир отметил свою Пасху. Дичь с этими датами, конечно, лютейшая, неужели все верующие во Христа не могут договориться об одном каком-то определённом дне и всем миром отмечать воскрешение (и рождество) именно в этот день? Насколько бы это было удобнее и правильнее! Впрочем, понятно, что каждое бандформирование сообщество верующих со своим смотрящим главным проповедником только о своей прибыли заботится... Одному выгодно делать так, а другому иначе, один говорит одно, а другой другое. И за всем этим перетягиванием одеяла на себя - не остаётся места для истинной веры... Да хотя какая в людях вера? Что им с амвона говорят - то они и делают, не пытаясь самостоятельно, напрямую, поговорить с Тем, в Кого (как они считают) веруют. Зато они истинно веруют в то, что только у батюшки есть прямой телефон в небесную канцелярию и только он может правильно трактовать слово Божие. А людишки сейчас нахристосовались, настучались яйцами крашеными, куличом пасхальным брюхо набили, в церковь зашли свечку поставить (потому как традиция такая) - и всё, долг скрепам отдали и пошли творить свои мерзкие дела дальше. 2026 лет тому назад Господь (такой всемогущий!) не придумал ничего лучшего, как послать Своего Сына, Иисуса Христа, на Землю из безграничной любви к человечеству, чтобы спасти людей от греха и смерти, вернуть их к Богу и даровать вечную жизнь. Он искренне надеялся, что люди пойдут за Иисусом, но те предпочли вместо учений распять Сына Божьего... Понятно, что Отец Сына на произвол судьбы не оставил, а воскресил и забрал к себе на небо. Но вот у меня вопрос: почему он послал рождаться мальчика именно в палестинский Вифлеем? Не в сибирскую тайгу, не в мексиканскую пустыню, не в какое-нибудь дикое племя в Бразилии? Чем был обусловлен выбор Его? Слепой случай, не та карта выпала, не на ту цифру поставил?
А так (пофантазируем), глядишь, родился бы Иисус в простой семье индейцев таино на острове Гаити - и вся история могла бы пойти совсем по другому пути - никто бы Иисуса не распинал на кресте, а, напротив, может быть сделали бы его верховным главнокомандующим жрецом. Ну да откуда нам знать замыслы Его?
В Доминикане на каждом углу можно видеть надписи: Cristo Viene (Господь придёт). Люди уже 2026 лет ждут второго прихода Мессии...
Да фиг он к вам придёт, господа-товарищи! Вы же не хотите следовать заповедям Его, вы же хотите продолжать воровать, убивать? Зачем ему дважды наступать на одни и те же грабли? Вы же его снова распинать станете...
Кстати, есть у меня подозрение, что доминиканцы и на это Воскрешение что-то накосячили, потому что погодка у нас весьма не характерная для этого времени, в столице повалило деревья, в Байяибе град с теннисный шарик...
In a 17-page order, Judge Darrin Gayles found that, even assuming everything in Trump’s complaint is true, Trump’s lawsuit “comes nowhere close” to meeting the standard for defamation. Gayles does not weigh in on whether the 2003 Trump letter was genuine, but notes that the lawsuit fails to establish that the reporters acted with “actual malice.”
Specifically, Gayles notes that the reporters reached out to Trump and others for comment, and printed Trump’s denial that he authored the letter in the piece. This showed that the reporters both investigated the letter’s authenticity and allowed readers to draw their own conclusions.
Yet another reminder that the outlets that help him, whether it’s through putting a thumb on the outlet’s editorial scales or handing over huge settlements plausibly deniable cash gifts without a murmur do it because they want to help him and think they’ve found a way to cover their bias.
Свое мнение о Дональде Трампе я высказывал уже неоднократно и даже, думаю, много чаще и подробнее, чем стоило бы, признаю, что тут проявилась ещё и некоторая моя эмоциональная несдержанность. Уж очень он мне отвратителен абсолютно по всем параметрам. И чем дальше я не просто наблюдаю, но во многом и чисто практически живу в ситуации, во многом определяемой этим человеком, тем более моё мнение о не всё ухудшается и ухудшается.
Что же касается нынешнего Папы Римского Льва, то, естественно, его влияние на мою жизнь неизмеримо меньше. Потому, конечно, и упомянутые эмоции сильно слабее. Но то, что я о нем знаю, в принципе вызывает у меня достаточное уважение. И прежде всего, его уровень образования, общей культуры и интеллекта в целом представляются мне несоизмеримыми с трамповскими. Только одно сравнение речи одного и другого чего стоит. Примитивный, отрывочный, крайне бедный до уровня убогости язык Трампа и вполне логичная, даже в какой-то степени изящная, строго логически выверенная речь Папы. Ну, просто небо и земля.
И вот учитывая всё сказанное и ещё многое другое подобное, что я просто для краткости сейчас опускаю, должен искренне покаяться. Да, в нынешнем разгоревшемся между ними глупейшем скандале я целиком и полностью на стороне Трампа. Хотя опять же, ведет себя при этом Трамп отвратительно, а Папа крайне достойно. И тем не менее. По сути и большому счету прав именно Трамп.
Так как все самые мудрые, красивые и как бы абсолютно верные и бесспорные теоретические призывы к дипломатии вместо войны, это, как в свое время говорила моя прабабушка "разговоры в пользу бедных". Или, используя формулировку другого крупного мыслителя, «формально правильно, а по сути издевательство».
И тут идеальной иллюстрацией может служить сцена из старого довольно средненького, но в определенной степени вполне правдивого, несмотря на всю свою фантастичность, фильма "День независимости". Помните?
Президент Уитмор: «Давайте объединимся и будем сотрудничать!»
Инопланетянин: «НЕТ!»
Президент: «Тогда чего вы хотите?»
Инопланетянин: «УМРИТЕ!».
Какая возможна дипломатия, например (это только частный случай и привожу его именно как только пример), между Ираном и Израилем? Если в Иране существует абсолютное табу даже на само словосочетание "государство Израиль", а используется исключительно "незаконное сионистское образование" и "раковая опухоль на палестинской земле".
И Иран готов вести любые переговоры только о способах уничтожения этого "незаконного образования" и методах вырезания этой "опухоли". Только. Без нюансов, оговорок и малейших отклонений.
И к кому в такой ситуации могут быть обращены самые высокие и убедительные речи с призывом к мирной дипломатии? К израильской военщине? Умно, ничего не скажешь.
К сожалению, Трамп от всего этого меньшим придурком не становится. И чем дальше, тем больше это проявляется. Но сути его правоты в данном конкретном конфликте с Папой это тоже не меняет.
Theresa works for a company that handles a fair bit of personally identifiable information that can be tied to health care data, so for them, security matters. They need to comply with security practices laid out by a variety of standards bodies and be able to demonstrate that compliance.
There's a dirty secret about standards compliance, though. Most of these standards are trying to avoid being overly technically prescriptive. So frequently, they may have something like, "a process must exist for securely destroying storage devices before they are disposed of." Maybe it will include some examples of what you could do to meet this standard, but the important thing is that you have to have a process. This means that if you whip up a Word document called "Secure Data Destruction Process" and tell people they should follow it, you can check off that box on your compliance. Sometimes, you need to validate the process; sometimes you need to have other processes which ensure this process is being followed. What you need to do and to what complexity depends on the compliance structure you're beholden to. Some of them are surprisingly flexible, which is a polite way of saying "mostly meaningless".
Theresa's company has a process for safely destroying hard drives. They even validated it, shortly after its introduction. They even have someone who checks that the process has been followed. The process is this: in the basement, someone set up a cheap drill press, and attached a wooden jig to it. You slap the hard drive in the jig, turn on the drill, and brrrrzzzzzz- poke a hole through the platters making the drive unreadable.
There's just one problem with that process: the company recently switched to using SSDs. The SSDs are in a carrier which makes them share the same form factor as old-style spinning disk drives, but that's just a thin plastic shell. The actual electronics package where the data is stored is quite small. Small enough, and located in a position where the little jig attached to the drill guarantees that the drill won't even touch the SSD at all.
For months now, whenever a drive got decommissioned, the IT drone responsible for punching a hole through it has just been drilling through plastic, and nothing else. An unknown quantity of hard drives have been sent out for recycling with PII and health data on them. But it's okay, because the process was followed.
The compliance team at the company will update the process, probably after six months of meetings and planning and approvals from all of the stakeholders. Though it may take longer to glue together a new jig for the SSDs.
[Advertisement]
BuildMaster allows you to create a self-service release management platform that allows different teams to manage their applications. Explore how!
Orban’s arguments were seized upon by “traditionalists” in Russia, who argued that the West was attempting to destroy Russia’s particular cultural heritage—a combination of Orthodox Christianity with traditional, authoritarian political and economic structures.
And despite cutting his teeth on anti-Soviet politics in the 1980s and 1990s, and demonstrating a wariness of Russia after his initial electoral victory in 2010, Orban eventually embraced Russian President Vladimir Putin as a strategic and cultural ally. After 2022, Orban acted as Putin’s right-hand man in Europe, slowing aid to Ukraine and the accession of Finland and Sweden into NATO.
Indeed, in 2026, Orban campaigned directly against Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, claiming that Zelensky was interfering with Hungary’s electoral process and intended to drag Hungary into war with Russia. Orban also made specious claims about Kyiv’s supposed abuse of Hungarian minority groups in Ukraine.
In the United States, Orban earned fans all over the political right, including President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance. The idea of illiberal democracy appealed to the president and his inner circle, who have long expressed a disdain for both the process of liberal democracy and for “globalists” who threaten to unsettle traditional racial, gender, and family hierarchies.
For his American backers, support of Orban was Culture War Through the Lens of Foreign Policy. For Russia it was that as well, but Russia also had practical reasons for supporting Europe’s biggest spoiler of support for Ukraine.
And if I may digress a bit here… I have grown increasingly frustrated with people who refer to themselves as foreign policy Realists, both inside and outside of academia, and much of my frustration is exemplified by the question of Orban. A group of think tankers who refer to themselves as Realists (I call this group “Pop Realists”) has either ignored or downplayed Magyar’s victory, largely for three reasons. First, they struggle with the fact that states care a great deal about regime type in other states; it is a core presumption of Realism (especially its Pop variety) that regime type is largely a secondary consideration for evaluating foreign policy. Second, Orban’s defeat undermines the argument that Europe has grown tired of supporting Ukraine. Much as in the United States, attitudes on Ukraine follow ideological lines in Europe, which is why support for Ukraine in the US dropped dramatically among Republicans following the Zelensky-Trump Oval Office Summit and recovered just as dramatically after it became clear that Trump would continue to support Ukraine. Most Pop Realists fancy themselves to be Restrainers (this is itself a reaction to Neoconservatism and the Iraq War) and a) blame the US for the war, and b) believe Ukraine should in some form be abandoned.
Finally, the support of both the Trump and Putin administrations (but especially the former) gave to Hungary undermines the idea that these two countries are operating according to rational-realist as opposed to ideological logics. Modern international relations Realism was founded as a reaction to the excesses of interwar liberal optimism. There is an extent to which the Realist critique of this liberalism was on solid ground; Kellogg-Briand was pernicious nonsense in a world where half of the great powers were dissatisfied and had no interest whatsoever in renouncing war as a tool of statecraft… which happened to be the same world in which the “liberal” great powers ruled vast swaths of the world at the barrel of a gun. Similarly, the mechanics of the League of Nations were fundamentally unsound for handling the problems that the members of the organization expected. The Realists (most prominently EH Carr and Hans Morgenthau) were less trying to demonstrate the essential nature of international politics than decrying the fact that liberal states were getting it wrong. But the Realist Reaction, such that it was, went too far, and today amounts to little more than a dismissive sneer of the idea that liberal internationalism might mean anything at all to foreign policy. To great extent, ideology that is not liberal internationalism is invisible to Realists… which is why they struggle mightily to successful anticipate and interpret the foreign policy actions and imperatives of Putin’s Russia and Trump’s America.
Genuine Realist scholars often understand that Realism is an explanatory model that can’t explain everything, and (to differing degrees) appreciate the limitations of the model. Pop Realist Think Tankers believe Realism is a Holy Writ that can explain international relations and (just as importantly) explain why Liberals Are Wrong about Everything. The former can (sometimes) be engaged with, the latter are safe to ignore.
Photo Credit: By Elekes Andor – Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=187550168
Российские власти собираются создать федеральный реестр вакцинированных граждан, который также будет содержать данные о тех, кто отказался прививаться. Это следует из проекта постановления Минздрава, с которым ознакомился (https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/8587625) «Коммерсант». Реестр планируется запустить 1 сентября 2028 года в составе Единой государственной информационной системы здравоохранения. Согласно проекту постановления, медучреждения должны будут передавать информацию о вакцинации россиян в систему в течение одного дня, а удалять сведения из реестра будет нельзя.
Оператором системы станет Минздрав. Доступ к базе получат Роспотребнадзор, Росздравнадзор, Минцифры, региональные органы здравоохранения и медицинские организации. Последние будут работать с персонифицированными данными, остальные — с обезличенными. В Минздраве отметили, что сведения об отказавшихся от прививок россиян будут использоваться «при разработке планов информационно-разъяснительной работы с гражданами, а также мер по повышению популярности и доступности мероприятий по вакцинации». В ведомстве заверили, что попадание в реестр не принесет никаких негативных последствий гражданам.
КДПВ из позапрошлого поста отлично подходит, не буду её повторять.
Предыдущие записи можно найти по тагу "МФ" здесь и в ЖЖ. В этом году я, наконец, нашел текст перевода одной из любимых моих песен (помог переводчик - Эли Бар-Яалом).
Look at this room full of treadmills — it’s an entire world of 12-3-30s just waiting to be tapped into. | Boston Globe via Getty Images
When it comes to exercise, so many people — beginners; die-hard enthusiasts; reluctant participants; and everyone in between — are searching for holy grails: workouts that involve the least amount of time and effort and offer maximum results.
We live in the most scientifically advanced age of fitness. Exercise is a multibillion-dollar industry, and a lot of that money is spent on new research and development of new technology. If there were an easier way to get the benefits of a squat or a pull up without having to actually do a squat or a pull-up, you’d think we would’ve found it already.
Despite the absence of a magic pill or a one-minute, low-impact total body workout that will burn fat, build muscle, and prevent all serious health problems, the industry is full of savvily marketed plans and potions, promising the world for just a little bit of time and work.
The latest trendy regimen to fall into this category is the cardio workout known as 12-3-30. Devotees say that 12-3-30 lives in that ideal intersection of minimal effort and maximum results.
Could this be true? Have we unlocked exercise’s biggest secret? Or is this yet another lie perpetrated by Big Treadmill?
The coaches and personal trainers I spoke to said 12-3-30 is a net positive. People moving their bodies is generally better than people not moving their bodies, and anything that gets folks exercising is a good thing. But they also believe that 12-3-30 offers a look into how people have traditionally thought about exercise as being complicated, and how much simpler it can be.
What is 12-3-30?
No one alive today can truthfully claim they invented walking uphill. But fitness influencer Lauren Giraldo is largely credited with rebranding this physical act as 12-3-30. Giraldo posted a YouTube video about 12-3-30 in 2019; in 2020, she claimed that walking on the treadmill at a 12 percent incline at the speed of 3 mph for 30 minutes helped her lose 30 pounds and keep the weight off. In an interview with Good Morning America, Giraldo said she began using the 12-3-30 formula because it was a way to work out that wasn’t intimidating.
The nice thing about 12-3-30 is that it’s simple. There are a finite number of settings on a treadmill, and the most difficult thing about this routine is remembering which number goes where. The incline is set at 12. The speed input is where the three goes. And 30 is the number of minutes needed to complete this ritual.
“12-3-30 works for what it was designed to do: a low-impact cardio workout that’s easy to repeat,” Charlee Atkins, a certified personal trainer and the founder of the guided exercise app Le Sweat, told Vox. “I’d categorize 12-3-30 as LISS, or low intensity steady state cardio.”
I tried 12-3-30 at the gym this week and was surprised: I didn’t expect walking at this seemingly measly pace to be difficult enough to work up a sweat.
Atkins explained that 12-3-30 and other LISS routines are effective because they allow you to get your heart rate up with relatively lower effort and less wear and tear on your body than something like running. This makes 12-3-30 particularly attractive to beginners, folks coming back after an injury or extended break, and anyone who wants to do the recommended amount of cardio for better health but doesn’t want to make it their full-time job.
James McMillian, a certified personal trainer and president of Tone House, a strength and conditioning facility in New York City, agreed with Atkins that 12-3-30 is good for a lot of people. Because it doesn’t require a particularly high skill level and is relatively easier on joints, its barrier to entry is lower. People turned off by more challenging forms of cardio, like running or group cycling classes, may find 12-3-30 more doable, which could lead to more consistency.
“You’re walking at an incline, so your heart rate stays up, you’re burning calories, and you’re getting some lower body endurance work in without beating yourself up,” McMillian said. “The more you remove friction, the more people stay consistent.”
I tried 12-3-30 at the gym this week and was surprised: I didn’t expect walking at this seemingly measly pace to be difficult enough to work up a sweat. Yes, 12-3-30 is super simple (almost annoyingly so), but it’s not really something you can coast through either. The pace is just a smidge above a brisk walking speed, the kind you would use to pass someone lollygagging in front of you on a sidewalk. The incline feels like a steep-ish hill. And while it certainly isn’t as challenging as the spinning or HIIT classes that I’ve taken, I did work up a sweat. (I generally don’t trust treadmill calorie counts but, for what it’s worth, the machine told me I had burned 390 calories.)
The experts I spoke to told me that to really get the most of the workout, you shouldn’t hold on to the treadmill’s hand rails. If you take that advice, it makes for a cardio experience that’s uncomfortable enough that you actually have to pay attention (I couldn’t text or scroll on my phone while doing it) but wasn’t impossible to finish either.
While experts I spoke to said that 12-3-30 isn’t a magic bullet and strength training might be more beneficial if your goal is getting stronger or enhancing athletic performance, there’s also a saying in the industry that the best workout is the one that you actually do. 12-3-30 is plan that a lot of people can perform consistently. By that standard, it’s a good one.
How much of 12-3-30 is just great marketing?
While effectiveness and consistency are crucial components, perhaps the biggest factor when it comes to 12-3-30’s popularity is that it’s easy to sell.
“12-3-30, it’s like the $5 footlong,” Bobby McMullen, a personal trainer and founder of the fitness app Adonis, told Vox. McMullen’s app matches clients with personal trainers based on goals, budget, and location, and he spends a lot of time thinking about how to meet gym goers where they’re at.
McMullen pointed out that workouts like P90X and Hard 75 become immensely popular in part because of how they’re packaged. It turns out that some people enjoy when their workouts, like their sandwiches, feature a numerical identifier. Branding matters, in part because partaking in the hot, number-named workout that everyone else is posting about can be a form of motivation.
“It sticks with you, so you know exactly what to do,” McMullen said. “You press a few buttons, you don’t change it for 30 minutes. It’s just a very catchy viral workout.”
McMullen and the other experts I spoke with noted that the gimmick of 12-3-30 also works because of the simple fact that many people go to the gym and either don’t know what to do or want/need to be told exactly how to use their time. Working out is an escape for a lot of folks, and who wants to think when they’re actively trying not to think?
Unlike the allure of bootcamps and other workouts that are proud of pulverizing you, 12-3-30’s charm is that it’s supposed to be easy enough — something that a wide swath of people can, in theory, accomplish. Its approachability is its strength, and a big part of why it’s so popular. McMullen said that one could even customize the program, and tinker with the speed to make it as easy or as difficult as needed. (But, he said, “going steeper is crazy.”)
“Moving your body at all is a win, and I will not, nor should any trainer, pooh-pooh any sort of overly marketed three-number system that gets you to move your body,” McMullen said, adding that the most important thing about 12-3-30 is that it’s showing people that working out doesn’t have to be as complicated as it seems.
“Whatever you can fit in is better than nothing,” he said. “If it’s all you have time for, run up that hill like Kate Bush, baby.”
Director Charlie Tyrell, left, and producer Daniel Kwan at a screening of Focus Features’ The AI Doc: or How I Became An Apocaloptimist on March 23, 2026 in Los Angeles, California. | Eric Charbonneau/Focus Features via Getty Images
In 1964, science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke predicted that computers would overtake human evolution.“Present-day electronic brains are complete morons, but this will not be true in another generation,” he told the BBC. “They will start to think, and eventually, they will completely out-think their makers.”
Daniel Roher opens his new documentary The AI Doc: Or How I Became An Apocaloptimist(2026)with this cheerful prophecy. And in the hundred-some minutes that follow, he tries to make sense of a technology that, by his own admission, he does not understand — and a world that is rapidly being changed by it. Explaining that he conceives of AI as a “magic box floating in space,” he enlists the help of experts to provide him with a crash course in what, exactly, AI is.
Roher’s real concern, however, isn’t so much about the workings of AI — though some of his subjects do attempt to explain them for him — but whether it might displace us, as Clarke’s prediction suggests it will.
While making the film, Roher learns that his wife Caroline is pregnant with their first child. He tracks his wife’s pregnancy and the birth of his son in parallel with the advent of AI. It’s a smart choice that builds on a fear all parents share: What sort of world are we making for our children? And behind that question is another, vibrating in anxious silence: What happens after our offspring replace us? This twinned existential angst drives his efforts to hear from the doomers, the techno-optimists, and the in-between “apocaloptimists” whose ranks he ultimately joins.
TheAI Doc, as its sweeping title suggests, wants to shape and lead the narrative around AI. It’s certainly set up to do that — Roher is fresh off an Oscar win for his documentary Navalny, and the film opened in nearly 800 theaters, which counts as wide-release for a nonfiction title. The final product is indicative of the ways that public attitudes around AI are in massive flux. Roher hopes to reach people of my grandmother’s generation who conflate AI with smartphones and spellcheck, as well as people who don’t seem to care whether a video was AI-generated.
But I think that this documentary has come too late to steer the conversation, something the film itself acknowledges. For all its transformative potential, AI isn’t actually unique among emerging technologies yet — it has not been cataclysmic or ushered in a golden age of prosperity — but Roher and many of those he interviews tend to treat it as a radical break with all that has come before. As a result, they tend to fixate on the binary extremes of doom or salvation. It’s an approach that reinforces our own helplessness in the face of AI-driven change, while also muddying our understanding of what we might yet be able to do as we seek to adapt, mitigate harm, and shape the world that AI could otherwise truly start remaking.
For good and for ill
Roher, contemplating his child’s future, opts to hear the bad news first. Tristan Harris, the cofounder of the Center for Humane Technology, doesn’t mince words: “I know people who work on AI risk who don’t expect their children to make it to high school.”
Many of the film’s other interviewees are similarly gloomy. Geoffrey Hinton, the “godfather of AI,” for example, argues that as AI becomes smarter, it will become better at manipulating humanity. But no one is more pessimistic than Eliezer Yudkowsky, the well-known AI doomer and co-author of the controversial book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. As the title suggests, Yudkowsky believes that superintelligent AI would wipe out humanity — a position that he stands by and lays out for Roher.
Turning his back on these storm clouds — and taking the advice of his wife, Caroline, who tells him that he needs to find hope for the future — Roher tunes into the chorus of AI optimists. They tell him, variously, that there are more potential benefits than downsides to AI; that technology has made the world better in every way; that this will be the tool that helps us solve all our greatest problems. Not to mention: AI will bring the best health care on the planet to the poorest people on Earth, extend our healthspan by decades, and enable us to live in a postscarcity utopia free of drudgery. Oh, and: We will become an interplanetary species, all thanks to AI.
These promises initially reassure Roher, perhaps because he seems easily led by whomever he’s spoken to most recently. It is Harris who ultimately convinces him that we can’t separate the promise of AI from the peril it presents. The conclusions that result will be obvious to anyone who’s thought about these issues for more than a moment or two: If AI automates work, for example, how will people make a living?
It doesn’t help that many of the most invested players reflect on these questions superficially, if at all. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tells Roher that he’s worried about how authoritarian governments will use AI — a claim that is followed in the film by a cut to images of Altman posing with authoritarian leaders. Other tech CEOs fall back on PR pleasantries in response to the filmmaker’s questions, and Roher too often goes easy on them, never diving deeper when they admit that even they aren’t confident that everything will go well. That these are the leaders of AI companies racing against each other to make the technology more and more advanced does little to inspire confidence.
(Some of the techno-pessimistic people interviewed for the documentary have expressed their strongdispleasure with the final result.)
“Why can’t we just stop?” Roher asks these tech CEOs. He’s told that a moratorium is a pipe dream: Many groups around the world are building advanced AI, all with different motivations. Legislation lags far behind the rate of technological progress. Even if we could pass laws in the US and EU that would stop or slow things down, says Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, we’d have to convince the Chinese government to follow suit.
If we don’t create it, the thinking goes, our enemies will. It’s best to get ahead of them.
This is, of course, the logic of nuclear deterrence: If we don’t mitigate the risk of ending the world through mutually assured destruction, there’s nothing stopping someone else from pressing the button first.
An apocalypse in every generation
The atomic comparison is apt, if only because Roher sees the stakes in similarly stark terms. “Will my son live in a utopia, or will we go extinct in 10 years?” he wonders aloud. It’s a question that’s central to the film. But he never really sits with the more likely scenario that AI will neither lead to human extinction nor end all disease and drudgery. Every generation faces the specter of its own annihilation — and yet the ends of days keep accumulating, no matter how close the doomsday clock gets to apocalypse.
The point, then, isn’t that AI won’t be bad for us, but that by framing the question in strictly utopian or dystopian terms, we miss the messy reality that lies between hell on earth and heaven in the stars. Although The AI Doc tries to chart an “apocaloptimist” course between two extremes, it doesn’t grasp the real stakes. AI doesn’t really create new risks as such — it’s a force multiplier for existingones like the threat of nuclear warfare and the development and use of biological weapons. The chief existential risks of AI are human-made and human-driven. And that means, as Caroline says in the film’s ending narration, “We get to decide how this goes.” She’s right, but her husband never seems to understand how she’s right.
Like too many Big Issue Documentaries, Roher’s film is heavy on problems and light on solutions. It does offer some, calling for international cooperation, transparency, legal liabilities for companies if something goes wrong, testing before release, and adaptive rules to match the speed of progress. But just as this is a strictly introductory course in AI — one that will probably irritate those who’ve already moved on to AI 102 — these recommendations are only a starting point. For Roher, they offer reason to be hopeful. For the rest of us, they’re just the beginning of an opportunity to meaningfully steer the course of our future.
люди обговорюють фотографії Орбана яким він був на початку кар'єри - і який він зараз. а я дивлюся на поточні фотографії Зеленського, і бачу, що він десь посередині цього шляху.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
re_animator) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
potsreotizm_old2026-04-14 05:33 pm
![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
[Advertisement]
