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Fun salad fingers story. When it first came out it was a hit in our circle of friends. It was also hosted on a website called fat-pie.com

One girl wanted to show her friend and her friends mum at their place, so she just googled “fat pie” on front of everyone.

Salad fingers was not above the fold in the search results. It was especially bad because her friend was a bit tubby.

There’s like a 15% tariff on imported cars (from memory), they’re definitely over priced there and always have been. There’s foreign brands thar aren’t imported, ie produced locally. For a while GM Shanghai was making a fuck load of cars there but its slowly been tapering off. My CN Telsa was bit cheaper than the same one in the US. But I couldn’t tell you that it’s apples for apples, sometimes the local model of something is cheaper because it’s made of cheaper stuff.

The bigger issue for big city china when buying a car is the plates. If its an ICE the cost of getting plates can be 100x that of a EV. Regardless of where it’s made.

As for stuffing products in a friendly customer or by some kind of stupid regulation is not common but happens. There is a complex web of incestuous company ownership and an equally complex web of influence and indirect ownership by the government. If someone needs to hit their numbers real bad it’s possible they’ll ask / insist / regulate that another company buys up to help make it happen. There are a few laws that are supposed to prevent it, but if nobody complains then probably nobody investigates.

I’ve seen this happen a few times with stuff much cheaper than diggers.

China was briefly an observer state to Warsaw Pact and then pretty quickly completely withdrew.

After sino-sovet split in the early 60s Sino-soviet relations did not really normalize until Gorbachev.

hello~

westerner tech guy in China here. they haven’t thrown me out yet, but then they haven’t grown up an equivalent of we do yet either. they haven’t tried to steal it or learn our secrets either.

nope for the last 3 or 4 years they’ve asked to license it to a local firm or better yet sell it outright to them. each time the price goes up and I suspect at some point it will become so irresistible that the founders will do it.

interestingly the sanctions closed us off from a lot of big institutes and companies who faced with losing the capability entirely just went ahead and acquired a bunch of Japanese stuff and jerry rigged it together. so that sucked.

because that’s it, if we don’t sell it to them someone else will and that’ll be the end of the party for everyone.

pretty sure this has played out in history before.

I know what happens. I put on a bunch of weight, the automatic immigration gate wouldn’t let me through and I got sent to the desk with a person. they told me it was because my face has changed too much grin they made a new picture and I was fine after that.

I lost a bunch of weight recently and while the machines let me in they wouldn’t let me out without going to the big desk again for a new photo.

There’s a bit more to it than that. But yes EVs are subsidized in China.

I worked in a business where we had one product that was useful for automakers but especially useful for EVs. About 8 years ago the EVs in China were mostly cheap shitty BYDs.

Seemingly out of nowhere, the government changed a bunch of rules and regulations for new cars. Within a month design teams were being established at every major automaker in China focusing on EVs. It was a great year for us.

Key EV components, especially the materials to make batteries, started to come down in price.

Then the green plates started turning up. Every city has its own rules for car registration, some places like Shanghai, would auction new number plates each month resulting in a low supply and high demand. It was possible to buy a car cheaper than the number plate. Then if you register an EV you can get a green plate for almost nothing.

About 3 years ago the cities started requiring new taxis and busses to be EV. Places like shenzhen just converted everything to EV. Released licenses for training and testing self driving.

Charge stations started popping up everywhere. There’s no way a shopping mall or new residential development could avoid having at least a large section for charging. My own home, converted an entire floor to charging parking stations in the underground car park.

Finally tesla set up Shanghai giga factory. I have no idea how they managed to make that deal but not long after they started shipping model 3s domestically they slashed the prices down to cheaper than a niceish BYD.

If you go to Shenzhen today about a third of cars are EV and you will see a dozen brands you’ve never heard of before (some are terrible cars, but most are reasonable quality and a handful are bullshit luxury)

As in tradition in China, the government will now let them go into a price war to push the manufacturers to find cheaper ways to make them. Many will go bust or give up.

my mum bought me a vic-20. it was beat up and didn’t have a tape deck.

I had type my games in from a magazine in basic for a summer, I was hooked.

My uncle gave me a photocopy of a book about assembly for c64 and showed me intros on his c128. He had no idea about programming, he just figured I’d be into it. I worked my heart out to get the cash together for a c64 AND a disk drive.

We probably wouldn’t want AI CEOs. Think about what they’d use for training data.

yeh but I got ten years of a really great game, with a really great community. It took a long time for me to care that the lane change mechanics weren’t optimal.

that ten years buys a fuck ton of good will for me. Life doesn’t run on legal obligations.

Yhey optimized and expanded the last CS game for like ten years. It was driven by DLC but the entire time CS vanilla was getting fixes and improvements.

There were some pretty lame limitations to the core simulation that stayed there the entire time but at least the devs were pretty open about having no plans to change them.

The CS2 story won’t really play out entirely for a year or two yet.

shrooms can be a bit of a dice room on visuals.

once boiled up half a shopping bag of shrooms and split the tea with one friend.

There were infinite moments where the fabric of space time twisted up into the cosmos believably revealing to me a path into the heavens. I had to control my breathing otherwise the torrent of everyday objects flowing past me would move too quickly for me to get enough traction.

I once had three tiny died shrooms, and a bong hit disconnected my soul from my body and transferring me into an ancient dog sleeping in the sun on a wide open field in the wilderness. the entire thing seemed to go for eons but collapsed back into my living room in and instant when some rang the doorbell.

Then I’ve had shrooms where the trip was extremely profound and emotional but the only visual was the leaves of the trees just looked a bit brighter and more flappy in wind or some swirly clouds of colors bouncing around my hifi speakers.

capslock drains the battery too quickly

you can visit the entire country on the subway or a short grab ride.

owning registering, parking, repairing and fueling a car is a completely unnecessary living cost, not to mention much much more expensive than the US or Europe.

what a lot of people can’t understand is that a car I’m singapore is a ball and chain. it’s not freedom by any stretch of the imagine there.

it’s a status symbol or a job requirement.

I have to assume that openAI also paid for the books. if yes then i consider it the same as me reciting passages from memory or coming up with derivative text.

if no, then by all means, go after them and any model trainer for the cost of one book.

Asking an LLM to recite an entire novel isn’t even vaguely a thing yet.

As a percentage of population (incarceration rate) its way way down the list, like 129th.

As a count of prisoners，its number two. USA is number one.

I didnt like friendlyjordies brand of humor. not one bit.

when he started going after that dog cunt broz I couldn’t help myself. I had to watch.

by now I love him, he’s become a hero of what free speech (such that it) is in Australia. served with a massive dose of sarcasm and ridicule.

I’ll keeping giving him money and watching his shit while he keeps going there and calling out all the bullshit that goes on in australian government.

doesn’t Chinese have pronouns though?

她 she 他 he 它 it

or am I missing something ?

It’s going to freak you out to learn there are actually pro-unification people in Taiwan of the “one country two systems” ilk. A lot less than there used to be, and I doubt it will ever be more than it is now.

This guy has been mega successful on the mainland he had reason to believe it would be a good thing for Taiwan.

If you ask people on the street most of them just want peace. Even if that means the Taiwan question never gets answered in their lifetime. When some thirsty westerner grand stands about Taiwan they cringe in fear knowing it will be their families who has to pay the bill.

Alot of people on either side of the strait feel nothing will happen and are tied of politicians amping it up and tempting fate.

For me it’s like this, I have a useful point to add to the conversation but when I interject the lag is juuuuust long enough that it ends up I’m talking over the next person.

So when I lead a meeting with zoom participants I either force dead air to allow the remote people to jump in, or I eat as much dead air as possible to lock them out of the conversation. depending on my own agenda.

incidentally this problem doesn’t exist in asynchronous collaboration methods. but zoom and it’s like win out on shear informwtion bandwidth.

The current video conferencing and remote working systems are indeed amazing feats of technology and social acceptance, but we still need to work on it. a lot.