Amap doesn’t support English unfortunately. Neither does Baidu. So it’s about as useful in the US as Google Maps is in China.

Edit: Apparently as of late January 2025 it supports English. This is SO USEFUL for foreigners visiting China, it was so annoying to navigate before without being able to read Chinese characters.

Exactly this Russia still has elections and an “opposition”. You can still be in control without necessarily being in the presidential position just as Putin was while Prime Minister after running out of terms.

At this point it’s probably good if he continues with more tariffs. If these were all suddenly removed tomorrow his base would still believe he knows good economic policy. More tariffs will continue to hurt the economy decisively showing them how bad these isolationist policies are.

Obviously the economy will be hurt by tariffs, but that’s the point and a worthwhile sacrifice for a sustained healthy economic policy in the future.

Their access to news is controlled and for some topics all available news is what we’d call propaganda. Particularly anything about Japan or the Taiwan issue. Most people I know there realize this to an extent but without any other information do still believe the core idea even if skeptical of details.

But at the same time I’d argue there’s no such thing as a population that’s not propagandized. In the US the big news corporations only will present views favorable to their profitability and continued growth. Sure they disagree with eachother, but it’s still always a pro-business view. State news from Russia is (I’d argue rightly) not available on many US platforms to discourage it’s influence for example.

This is how Dallas got a Republican Mayor. They elected a Democrat but less than a month later he flipped, such clearly premeditated party changes should be illegal, it’s not what the voters thought they were casting their ballots for.

The writing has been on the wall for a while now. All retirement planning I’ve done is based on the assumption that SSA won’t be around by the time I retire. The fact that we can’t even remove the taxable maximum to retain some degree of financial solvency is proof enough.

I think the most likely course of action is that we will get some portion of our contributions back, but not the full amount. I just hope that they don’t raise the retirement age so much to try to retain the illusion of being able to get a full payout. I’d rather get a fraction of my contributions back at 67 than need to risk living to a much older age but receiving full benefits.

If Microsoft really wants people to switch to Windows 11 they need to retain many of the already few remaining customization options from Windows 10. Trackpad gesture support is worse, the only useful button in the new right click menu is the show more one which brings back the old menu but requires an extra click, and the file explore somehow got even more buggy. I hate every time I need to interact with a computer using Windows 11.

Luckily there’s been an initiative within my company recently to support Linux, so I’m hoping that all the network related issues are fully worked out before Windows 11 is forced on us so I can just jump ship to Ubuntu.

Surprisingly asking about Jack Ma’s resignation didn’t stop it, it mentioned that he was allegedly forced to step down for political reasons. When I probed further on what these were it didn’t error but did randomly switch to Chinese at one point in the answer.

It’s very verbose compared to any other AI I’ve used. Not necessarily all great but there’s some good parts in the responses. I’m more curious how it was trained behind the great firewall.

Unfortunately the next administration will likely agree with the ISPs on this. To an extent T-Mobile and Verizon 5G home internet has genuinely shaken up the industry. As long as low latency isn’t a requirement of yours they’re quite good. For me they offer higher upload speeds than my local ISP monopoly with similar download speeds.

More than likely he’d just go the direction of Russia/Putin and run behind a candidate he endorses but then effectively take control after the puppet candidate wins.

FT asking is insane. I’m happy to pay for quality journalism but that’s simply out of reach for most Americans. I’d love to know how their management determined this was an appropriate price.

Back when the COVID vaccine was new it was reasonably common to hear my body my choice in this context

With a laptop and phone which both can use it my backpack while travelling is so much lighter and less bulky. For me it absolutely was a game changer, I just don’t like that I need to carry a USB a to C adapter for all the legacy USB A ports.

Not sure who would buy it full price but in most of the apps if you’re not picky there’s always some amount of deals to get a meal under $5. I only go occasionally as the deals aren’t as good as they used to be across the board and the quality is universally terrible. Taco Bell is also its own unique thing which no other Mexican restaurant will get you so occasionally it just sounds good.

That being said in my area you can go to nearly any proper restaurant and get carry-out under $15 with Texas sized portions. As someone with an unhealthy work/life balance particularly in the evenings, this or bulk curry is how I usually eat dinner.

Putin also was able to only serve for two terms, so he replaced himself with a crony until he could change the law to remove term limits…

NYT forecast is 90% Trump now. It’s crazy that anyone would vote for him, really shows that policy plays no part in politics. It’ll be interesting to see how he tears down the judicial system to remove the many charges against him.

I don’t know what’s up with the algorithm pushing these lately. If it’s a video with 4 views from a channel with no subscribers I’m probably not interested in it. Sometimes they have a good thumbnail/title so I give them a chance but 9/10 times it’s terrible. Also often extremely right wing for whatever reason.

Sounds like Russia is already expecting hyperinflation

I thought that without blocking cookies the tracking is still active, even if you’re not being served ads from them. In those same LinkedIn privacy settings you’re automatically opted into having your data used to train AI models.

LinkedIn has some of the most obfuscated and complex ad targeting settings I’ve encountered. There needs to be a retirement to have a one click solution to disable ad personalization.