Action_Bastid

I've already had several non-tech people say something along the lines of "What the heck is this X thing on my phone?"

I gotta wonder how many other people are just impulse uninstalling something they don't recognize off their phone as well, since ol' Musky boi did this with basically zero user notice as well.

It's almost 100% because they were in violation of at least some of the content policies found here

It's just that the Fediverse now has enough global attention being paid to it that they're probably actually cracking down on enforcement. Probably something under the "Insults" or "Racism" content policy, since those are the most vague and poorly defined and highly likely to be "obvious" primarily to the country who is operating them, Mali.

No, I meant it in a completely serious way. The explosion might be been powerful enough to lift the decking of the bridge straight up and sheared a lot of connection points in the girder and headers, but depending oh how much force was directed perpendicularly, it might have just caused it to slam down on top of the caps and pillars and just sit there with a really bad weight distribution.

In terms of functionality, that sort of damage is better compared to maybe a cracked windshield, as an analogy? You can keep trucking along and maybe everything will be fine, but the overall structural integrity of the windshield is now in a much riskier state. Any further strikes could cause further destabilization radiating outward from the flaw or worse, the continued use could be causing the material to continually weaken as stress points are flexed over and over and over and over. Similar to how if you bend a stiff piece of metal back and forth, it gets looser and eventually snaps.

The photos Russia themselves published show levels of damage that would take, at minimum, days to weeks to fix back to perfect assuming you're running everything as an emergency 24/7 rush job, and realistically more likely months since you're not likely to have a super dense civilian engineering firm able to just instantly slide into place. The more likely case is that Ukraine caused damage that drastically weakened that section of the bridge, but didn't hit it in such a way as to do much more reduce the weight load that can go over or it alternatively drastically shorten the lifespan of the bridge without major repair. That seems pretty consistent with what you'd expect out of a drone bomb blowing up under the bridge, rather than something coming in and hitting it from the side, like a missile or something impacting from the top down.

Russia is leaning on the thought that the patch job will hold longer than the state of hostilities and that they can do more long term repairs once things have cooled off some. But for now, supplies NEED to be run over that bridge, so fast patch and reduced weight and lifetime is the cost they pay.

NC is a "Free City" in terms of it's status within the structure of NUSA. Essentially, a territory they claim is theirs, but which they don't actually have the means to exercise control over. So it just functions more or less autonomously.

But it essentially functions as a Japanese Treaty Port in terms of military influence and is the point where East Asian and NUSA criminal and corporate organizations use to bring goods cheaply into and out of the NUSA market with both international and domestic corporations using Night City as a corporate tax haven and tariff-free port of entry. Smuggling is king as everyone seeks to skim their share off the goods as they move inland, each government agency or smuggler serving as competing "taxes" for entry into markets.

NUSA has largely reunited in 2070, but NC is still one of the last holdouts, backed as it is with all the might of Arasaka and the threat of igniting a new Corporate War if NUSA were to try to annex it and actually attempt to assert influence over the city.

As someone who tried to use Tidal for nearly a year because it paid better rates, it's literally just 2 things: Artist Discovery and Algorithm Degradation towards a mass consumer mean.

Spotify actually feeds me tons of great indie artists I've never heard before. Tidal was a constant struggle to purge mass produced giant record label pop from constantly infiltrating every single station and it almost never gave me some little artist who maybe has 5k listens total. I get those literally every single day from Spotify though.

Bridges are actually pretty difficult to take out if you can't get in to hit specific weak points and if you're willing to just keep running the risk of crossing over damaged bridges and maybe lose everything on it.

It's exacerbated by the Black Sea being a relatively gentle body of water, so even if you pop the top, it might slam back down in such a way that's it's still usable and because there isn't as much perpendicular pressure from the sea or wind, it's easier for it to just kinda settle there and just slowly degrade away rather than collapse into utter non-functionality all at once.

Mate, you're talking out your ass. Neodynium is a rare metal, yes. But we're not going through neodymium deposits fishing out magnets like they're some sort of gemstone.

That shit gets mined, melted, alloyed with other minerals, smelted into shape then run through magnetic field generators to induce a magnetic charge in them, as just a very rough overall view of the process.

The biggest issue is that making them is INCREDIBLY material inefficient. Making one really good quality magnet requires an absolute fucking shit ton of processing, all of which reduces yield and increases waste product generation every step of the way.

......we can literally just manufacturer super powerful magnets. What the hell are you talking about?

Void is gonna do real well this year, I'd imagine.

I'd wager they're attempting to replicate or integrate tools developed by the open source community or which got revealed by Meta's leak of Llama source code. The problem is, all of those were largely built on the back of Meta's work or were cludged together solutions made by OSS nerds who banged something together into a specific use case, often without many of the protections that would be required by a company who might be liable for the results of their software since they want to monetize it.

Now, the problem is that Meta's Llama source code is not based on GPT-4. GPT-4 is having to reverse engineer a lot of those useful traits and tools and retrofit it into their pre-existing code. They're obviously hitting technical hurdles somewhere in that process, but I couldn't say exactly where or why.

I'm not terribly surprised. A lot of the major leaps we're seeing now came out of open source development after leaked builds got out. There were all sorts of articles flying around at the time about employees from various AI-focused company saying that they were seeing people solving in hours or days issues they had been attempting to fix for months.

Then they all freaked the fuck out and it might mean they would lose the AI race and locked down their repos tight as Fort Knox, completely ignoring the fact that a lot of them were barely making ground at all while they kept everything locked up.

Seems like the simple fact of the matter is that they need more eyes and hands on the tech, but nobody wants to do that because they're all afraid their competitors will benefit more than they will.

Meta provides a lot of other backend B2B services beyond just Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.

You think that's the only way they have of scarfing down data? Absolutely not, they make other useful tools as well that businesses can use, because if they can't get their info directly from you, they can get it from the people you have to regularly interact with instead.