In the case of X, the business owner is aggressively pushing his political views on users by heavy-handed methods like prioritizing his own posts in algorithmic feeds and overriding the context of his AI bot to parrot his pet ideas.
If you went to a restaurant and it had Confederate flags and pro-slavery memorabilia on the walls, would you think: “Well, that’s just their political view, I don’t have to share it to eat here?”
> pushing his political views on users by heavy-handed methods like prioritizing his own posts in algorithmic feeds
He's also using his fame and fortune to much more directly fund and promote political change in places like the UK. It goes beyond this one service, but moving away from this service weakens his position more broadly as well.
I will always remember fondly the story of "Little Black Sambo". I was at that point in childhood where judgement was not yet developed but I could appreciate a good story, especially if fantastic things happened. After all, I was a little boy like Sambo.
So I feared for Sambo when he encountered the tigers. I was elated when he eluded them by first racing around the tree and then climbing it. I was mystified how tigers running round and round a tree could turn to butter (but set that aside so I could continue the story and reduce my fearful suspense). I was relieved to see that Sambo was safe. I identified with Sambo (although I am neither black or brown).
Hoorah for the fantastic tales from many lands that filled my childhood and those of my brothers and sisters with wonder!
I am still a child when I read fairy tales and fables.
> the business owner is aggressively pushing his political views
That's always been the case with Twitter - Dorsey was just as bad, but just with a different set of political views. (Views that, I presume, the EFF is aligned with).
> If you went to a restaurant and it had Confederate flags and pro-slavery memorabilia on the walls, would you think: “Well, that’s just their political view, I don’t have to share it to eat here?”
Even more so if it's not just a personal decision to get a bite to eat, but one taken by a lobbying organization about where to host events promoting speech rights, and the new owner is co-opting their language of speech rights to justify his policy of putting Conferedate flags behind the bar (whilst actually barring more people he doesn't like than the old owner as well as scaring off most of the people who supported the organizations mission and pasting KKK event ads flyers over the top of theirs). At some point continuing to hang out there and host events for ever diminishing numbers of people who mostly seem to reinterpret everything you say as screeds against 'woke' ceases to be a "politically neutral, pro-free speech" stance.
Last year my sister visited me and she wanted to go a nearby karaoke bar because she loves karaoke. I'd never been to this place before.
We get there and it's all white people, and there was an older gentleman singing a country song. We take a seat at an empty booth underneath a confederate flag and a sign about the 2A. We joke about how rednecky the vibes were.
For context, my wife is Chinese and wears a hijab, my sister and I are southeast Asian, and my sister's boyfriend is Indian. Couldn't have a more non-white group if you'd asked for one.
Despite feeling deeply out of place, but not unsafe, we got some songs in, ate some meh bar food, and had an all-around good time. My sister's boyfriend chatted with some people in the smoke room. Everyone was friendly.
A lot of people really don't care about the politics of the establishments they visit. They just want to have a good time.
"If you went to a restaurant and it had Confederate flags and pro-slavery memorabilia on the walls, would you think: “Well, that’s just their political view, I don’t have to share it to eat here?”
Yes? If you go to the southern part of the United States, there are many restaurants with Confederate memorabilia and Confederate flags on the back of truck windows.
Some trucks even have hairy testicles hanging off the hitch haha!
If people get gender-affirming care for their trucks, that's their own business, but no, no I will not eat in a place with a Confederate flag.
I find the idea of venerating an ideology that held that it was ok to hold human beings in bondage from the moment of their birth to their death to be abhorrent.
”Hosseini said that each tanker must email authorities about its cargo, after which Iran will inform them of the toll to be paid in digital currencies.
“He said that the tariff is $1 per barrel of oil, adding that empty tankers can pass freely.
“‘Once the email arrives and Iran completes its assessment, vessels are given a few seconds to pay in bitcoin, ensuring they can’t be traced or confiscated due to sanctions,’ Hosseini added.”
As bitcoin is quite traceable I don't see how this works if you're trying to avoid sanctions. For Iran it probably doesn't matter but for the vessel owners it probably does.
Business idea - Iran Bitcoin fee intermediary. Realistically the CIA will handle this for US companies and maybe allies until they figure something out.
Not over lightning. Even on-chain, trustless coin swaps (or cross-chain swaps) can be made with different counterparties all over the world where transaction details are all held off-chain (pay in ethereum and receive on bitcoin for example).
So apart from all the geopolitics of it this line is interesting
"few seconds to pay in bitcoin, ensuring they can’t be traced or confiscated due to sanctions,’ Hosseini added"
Maybe I'm ignorant of Bitcoin but isn't Bitcoin transactions recorded in a public cryptographically signed ledger? Isn't that literally the opposite of "can't be traced"?
Or, if you knew the bitcoin addresses, you could figure out exactly how much oil is being moved. I would think oil data analysts would love to have access to that data (if they don't already).
What is to stop the ships from lying ? I wonder if Iran will do spot check of some ships to prevent this. And will boarding ships cause Trump to have yet another breakdown ?
Even if ship displacement wasn't an observable thing, there's no real reason that empty oil ships enter the strait, and then again leave empty, after having obviously docked at an oil terminal, on any regular basis.
Public and observable information makes it trivial to make high-accuracy assessments about the veracity of the claim.
And $2m is sufficient budget to finance spot checks, especially given you'd have to apply them to an exceedingly small percentage of ships. A year salary of an average Iranian police guard is about 5k, for context.
Plus you can create a scenario where fraud being detected is prohibitively expensive, and may even result in the captain being imprisoned in Iran. I wouldn't expect a lot of lies.
Lying about their cargo? Can’t lie about the weight … Probably the savings from lying about the nature of the cargo is not worth the risk of exploding..
Animated GIF is a format that was designed for playback on late 1980s PCs with a 20 MHz 386 and VGA graphics…
If anything, this example proves the point that we’ve made the simple stuff much too complex. The GIF format hasn’t changed, but somehow getting those indexed color frames to screen on time now requires a GHz core.
About twenty years ago I was generating long animated GIFs. They worked fine in Firefox. In Internet Explorer they started fine but became jankier as playback progressed. I realised that every time IE displayed a frame it was rereading the entire file from the beginning to get to the current frame. Which took longer and longer as the current frame advanced.
It's just so easy to squander performance without noticing.
The reason you need a GHz core is that modern GIFs stretch the file format to its limits, by doing 30 or even 60fps in extremely-coloured files with resolutions that easily beat the render resolution of 1980s PCs just in a little corner of the screen.
GIF is an awful format for its modern usage that will easily waste tens of megabytes for even a short and small file. That's why many services secretly convert GIF files and serve them as video files, or other animated files that are more efficient (such as WebP).
The difference in opinion between "the simple stuff" and "missing the bare basics" seems to come down to what year you were born and what kind of services you grew up with. I don't need 90% of what Discord has to offer me but when reading along with discussions of Discord users looking for alternative platforms, fleeing their age verification and such, I find that most Discord users will absolutely demand the features I didn't even know chat apps support.
SECAM was pretty crazy because it required a delay line: a memory that would hold the previous scanline so it can be combined with the current one.
Without digital circuits, the delay line was a piece of glass. You’d convert the video signal to a sound wave, send it through the glass, and (hopefully) get it back exactly 64 us later so it aligns with the next scanline.
Yes I did read about these while doing my research. Also fascinating. Most (or maybe all?) PAL TVs also have a delay line to correct for phase errors. That ability is what differentiates PAL from NTSC, apart from timing.
Thanks for the Tintin reference! I immediately knew what you mentioned as that panel flashed in my mind.
I don't know what it is about the Tintin comics, but for many of the fans, the panels are so strongly memorable even after so many years, is quite amazing.
When the blog post mentioned Hegseth and “digital escort” in the same sentence, I was surprised to learn it wasn’t about his OnlyFans habit at his work desktop.
If you went to a restaurant and it had Confederate flags and pro-slavery memorabilia on the walls, would you think: “Well, that’s just their political view, I don’t have to share it to eat here?”
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