He was evading capture to some extent, but he barely tried to alter his appearance, even when his picture was being widely circulated. Maybe he thought his capture was inevitable, so it wasn’t worth the effort. Maybe he wanted to be caught, but didn’t want it to be easy. Probably he had doubts.

Maybe he planned on surrendering immediately, then he saw that he was getting away with it so he changed his mind, then he thought with the huge manhunt it was just a matter of time so there was no point in trying too hard to run, then he saw how much support he was getting so he changed his mind again.

To me, that’s all a lot more believable than some elaborate plot to frame him, because of how many people would have to be in on that secret and be able to keep it for a long time.

Yeah, “fall into the sun” was sort of hyperbole. If it truly got out into space and was going fast enough to escape Earth’s gravity, it would start orbiting with earth’s orbit plus some delta. Out of all the possible angles it could leave the earth, there are probably 2 angles where it would directly hit the sun One is the angle that cancels out all the orbital velocity of the earth and sends it directly at the sun, the other is the one that does the same but sends it directly away from the sun. Of all the possible trajectories on the surface of a sphere, only those two tiny solutions would end up with it contacting the sun, everything else would result in an orbit.

Of course, given enough time, it’s pretty likely that if it isn’t collected by a planet, it will eventually end up in the sun. There isn’t much friction in space, but there’s a tiny bit: solar wind, micrometeoroids, etc. Eventually its orbit would decay and it would stray too close to the sun.

In the real world they probably stop when they can no longer hear the rushing water. So, I assume if you’re continually playing the sound of rushing water, they’ll never stop.

We’ve seen how easily rich people can get away with serious crime. I hope that this guy has a very successful public funding campaign and can hire the most expensive lawyers.

I want CEOs of companies doing unethical things to be very scared for as long as possible. The longer Mangione stays out of prison, the more fear they’ll continue to have.

If the manifesto was something he wrote, it could be that he expected / wanted to be caught. If you’re not evading capture, you might not be destroying evidence. That’s the simpler explanation that doesn’t require a huge conspiracy.

It’s like what happened with Spotify. The artists and the labels were unhappy with the copyright infringement of music happening with Napster, Limewire, Kazaa, etc. They wanted the music model to be the same “buy an album from a record store” model that they knew and had worked for decades. But, users liked digital music and not having to buy a whole album for just one song, etc.

Spotify’s solution was easy: cut the record labels in. Let them invest and then any profits Spotify generated were shared with them. This made the record labels happy because they got money from their investment, even though their “buy an album” business model was now gone. It was ok for big artists because they had the power to negotiate with the labels and get something out of the deal. But, it absolutely screwed the small artists because now Spotify gives them essentially nothing.

I just hope that the law that nothing created by an LLM is copyrightable proves to be enough of a speed bump to slow things down.

It wouldn’t contain any public-domain data though. That’s the thing with LLMs, once they’re trained on data the data is gone and just added to the series of weights in the model somewhere. If it ingested something private like your tax data, it couldn’t re-create your tax data on command, that data is now gone, but if it’s seen enough private tax data it could give something that looked a lot like a tax return to someone with an untrained eye. But, a tax accountant would easily see flaws in it.

Yeah, or at least there’s a running water sound nearby. If you play a recording of a sound of running water near a beaver, it will build a dam. It doesn’t even have to feel the running water. I’m not sure if it even has to be at the closest point it can get to the sound, or if it uses other cues like a narrowing of the area so that a dam will be the most effective.

In this case, the hallway may be seen like a “choke point” for flow, so it’s a good spot for a dam.

I’m curious what the thinking is for dam building. You’d think that a beaver would only build when it was actually in flowing water, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. But, what other things are they considering. Do they try to find the lowest point in an area at least? Do they consider how narrow the area is?

A small train that carries its tracks with it wherever it goes?

A better question is whether a self-propelled artillery “train” is a tank.

As one step of building a bigger project that demonstrates something web-ish.

Yeah, Douglas Rushkoff has a book about that, Survival of the Richest. For some reason, billionaires consulted him about their “shit hits the fan” plans, and he laughed at them and wrote a book about it. They had all these elaborate fantasies about how they were going to keep their security team loyal after civilization collapsed, or about how they’d avoid having any humans working for them and use robots instead. But, they hadn’t even thought about the most basic things.

Like, one guy had an underground bunker complete with a swimming pool (or at least plans for one). Rushkoff said to the guy that his neighbor had a pool and frequently had contractors over to clean it, or replace parts, etc. He asked what the guy was going to do about basic pool maintenance. The guy got out a notepad and wrote “get replacement parts for the pool” or something. He basically hadn’t even thought 1 step beyond the initial idea.

You’re right that the best plan for an apocalyptic scenario is to have useful skills that other people will appreciate, so that you can be a valuable, contributing member of their community. And no, billionaire CEOs, “leadership skills” don’t count. Or, if they do, the leaders will either be strongmen who are personally very comfortable with using violence to ensure everyone falls in line, or they’ll be very empathetic people who resolve disputes and make sure everyone works in harmony. It won’t be people who make “cut-throat decisions” but who faint at the sight of actual blood.

The Russian ports on the Black Sea are so absurd that if you encountered a setup like that in a video game you’d just quit because it’s unrealistic.

Scenario:

Game: Ok, you’ve got a port that’s open year round with access to both the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

Player: Yay, I set sail for the Atlantic.

Game: You set sail, making good time across the Black sea. To continue to the Atlantic, you first have to pass through the Bosporous, a narrow channel that goes right through the biggest city of Turkey. You need to make it worth their while.

Player: This is bullshit. Ok, I bribe Turkey, now am I in the Atlantic?

Game: You’ve made it past Turkey. Are you at peace with Greece?

Player: Yes… why?

Game: Congratulations, you are able to pass the Agean sea. You have now made it to the Mediterranean sea.

Player: Wait, I wanted to go to the Atlantic.

Game: To go to the Atlantic, proceed to the Strait of Gibraltar. Are you at peace with England?

Player: What? Wait, this is bullshit. Another strait? And isn’t England up in the northern Atlantic? I’m at peace with Spain, France, Italy… what does England have to do with it?

Game: England controls the Strait of Gibraltar.

Player: This is bullshit, ok, I go to the Indian ocean instead.

Game: Are you on good terms with Egypt, Yemen, Eritrea and Djibouti?

If the web server is implemented in any of the languages that require semicolons.

Any programming language that runs on the web server and doesn’t gracefully handle its errors. There are many web servers implemented in Javascript, but it could also be Java, it could be Perl, it could even be C/C++ if someone is being masochistic.

Thiel has a bunker in NZ that he plans to retreat to if “shit hits the fan”.

How hard would it be to convince him to bug out and seal himself up in that place, cutting off all communications? Obviously, I’d prefer if he were dead, but sealed up in a hole in the ground terrified about what’s happening in the outside world would be an acceptable compromise.

Congrats, captain america!

What makes you think they did?

Battleships being at the center of naval plans obviously changed. But, I think you’re right that something battleshippy will probably still exist.

I mean, look how long it took for the spear to go away. With bayonets you could argue that they’ve never gone away. But, they’re now a secondary thing, rather than the primary thing armies are designed around.

I could imagine a future where a sea-tank exists, something that can take a hit and attack with direct-fire weapons. Having said that, the war in Ukraine is showing that a multi-million dollar tank can be taken out with a few hundred dollars in drone gear. Battleships are/were closer to $1 billion, and they were already mostly obsolete when they were in danger from multi-million dollar planes, dropping thousand dollar bombs, piloted by pilots who had been trained at the cost of millions of dollars.

The subs contain lots of drones, but the subs are unmanned, making them drones, and they’re launched by a bigger mothership sub that’s also a drone. All manned by midgets pretending to be AI, of course.

With the success of drones in Ukraine, I wonder if the future’s just going to be midget drone-mothership subs.