> It's not something government should regulate but it is something that government policy should incentivize.
Every time this comes up, there are numerous instances reported of welfare states in Europe, Asia, etc. trying this and it not working.
The west, and especially the US is falling out of love with republicans and liberal democracy as they learn that some problems need to solved with an iron fist.
The "iron fist" is merely creating new problems at an alarming rate. Sure, in theory a wise benevolent monarch could institute reforms that are hard in a democracy. In practice, the current crop is nothing but performative grifters and their cheerleaders are unwilling to draw the distinction.
I'm curious what you think about Iran killing 30,000+ protestors in the streets last month, going to hospitals to kill the injured, and continuing to review video footage to actively seek out and kill scores of 2+ million protestors?
Personally I find it strange that with all the vocal detestation of "Nazis" so many people aren't in favor of intervening when an undeniably fascist regime commits the largest mass murder since the early days of the Holocaust and has no plans to stop the killing.
It’s indisputable that the Iranian regime is horrid to Iranians (most of them). But what the US just did is actually strenghtening the grip of the Islamic regime, they get unified against an attacker, their aging aytolah turned into a martyr and a new young one was put in place, oil fields set on fire, plenty of indiscriminate bombing on civillians and so on. This is a major fuck-up.
A large chunk will fight for their life to hold onto the old regime. Remains to be seen what will come out of this. Civil war in Iran is still a major fuck-up IMO.
I'm curious why do you think that a half-assed undercooked invasion at Israel's beck and call is the only possible solution to this issue when we have ample historical evidence that invading Middle East literally never worked?
Israel is a country without oil. Over 2 years, it killed 60,000 people in Gaza - about twice as many as the Iranian regime killed in 2 days. The former was described as genocide, the latter was widely ignored. And for 2 years, Israel's war against Hamas was the headline story every day on every media outlet in the world. There was no end of people screaming for intervention.
You're right, no one pays attention to Sierra Leone, or Sudan, or Myanmar. And no one here or in the media would care that some country was fighting a war with the Iranian regime either, as long as the country country fighting it wasn't populated by Jews.
My country doesn't sell Iran any weapons they used to kill protestors and independentists. I am allowed to boycott Iranian products, like my father was allowed to boycott SAF products. I just want my country to stop selling weapons that help killing civilians and end up in west bank terrorists hands. And be allowed to boycott what the fuck I want.
Iran's mass murder after the protests was not ignored. We had a mass protest in my city. I'm not sure if you can call it genocide because it's their own people, the same race and identity. It's certainly mass murder and terrible but not an attempt to change the population racial makeup. Thus the label genocide doesn't qualify, but yes the actions are morally equally bad. Just a different label.
The reason there's less attention is twofold:
First of all our countries support Israel so we are complicit. That calls for more protest among us who don't agree because there's actually something we can change. Iran is not going give a crap when they see people marching in protest in Europe.
Another thing is that Israel has no business being in Gaza in the first place. Iran's government unfortunately does have a legitimate claim to governance in Iran.
I'm not against Jews at all but I am against my country supporting genocide.
Also I don't think one country unilaterally bombing a place they have nothing to do with is the answer to any problem.
Why so many words to say "anyone who criticizes Israel is an antisemite"? If you really think Gaza gets too much attention, then instead of silencing others, why don't you just start talking about the injustices that you think are underrepresented.
Sudan is the classic example. 90% of Americans could barely point to it on a map. Most Europeans have no idea there's a civil war raging for the last 3 years and created millions of refugees, killed hundreds of thousands, subjected tens of millions to famine.
The problem is you can't paint it as "good guy" and "bad guy"
it’s so obviously a farce when you’re bombing girls schools and when Israel starts hitting oil fields, suddenly fucking Lindsey Graham wants restraint.
Is it fair to say the Open Router models aren't subsidized though? They make the case that companies on there are running a business, but there are free models, and companies with huge AI budgets that want to gather training data and show usage.
Interesting, Mexico has in the past been a big source of SIM cards for questionable activity in the US. Now the flow may be reversed but of course the cost is ~15x in the US. Or will there be a big influx of Honduran or some other CA county SIMS?
That's surprising, US sim cards are routinely used for questionable activity in the US. What kinds of questionable activities would benefit from using a Mexican SIM in the US?
Not a direct answer to your reuqestion re: questionable activity, but for me it's more about ease of access.
A SIM in the U.S. is significantly more difficult to acquire than a SIM in Mexico/many other countries.
E.g.
- Limit on # of SIMs purchased at retailers, low ability to use cash to purchase them, generally always on camera
- SIMs locked up behind the counter at lots of major retailers in the U.S.
- Activation requirements on U.S. networks for prepaid SIMs
Granted, if you're a company you can certainly acquire a lot of SIMs. A lot of questionable activity uses straw purchases, very similar to folks using smurfs to acquire pseudoephedrine in the 2000s.
Certain internet forums related to VOIP routing seem to have no lack of sellers offering to sell all kinds of US sim cards by the thousands, I don't think availability is an issue.
Historically, availability was very different between the two countries when we're specifically talking about purchasing SIMs for questionable activity.
Physically acquiring the SIMs is only one part of the process as they're pretty worthless without going through the activation process.
Prior to this year in Mexico (which introduced ID-based regulations around SIM purchase/activation), you could buy a SIM at a remote gas station, a data package in cash, and activate it without giving your name/email/etc. Now, in 2026, you have to show an ID/passport to do that.
The U.S. doesn't have a federal regulation (as far as I know) for this. That level of network protection is usually at the provider level. However, activating the SIM almost always requires an email or existing phone number and not just purchase/possession of the SIM+top-up card. Purchasing the top-up card sometimes can be done in cash, other times requires a pre-paid debit which has its own limitations/regulations due to a mix of KYC/AML. But applying said top-up card usually still requires at least some form of identity verification. For some of the top national providers, and I'm not sure what model they use to gauge risk to make this decision, they even require an SSN (for prepaid!) and run some form of a check on you (I'm not entirely sure if it's a soft credit check or what).
To me this doesn't sound logical because you still have to hire someone to manage your cloud deployments which is an entire specialized discipline. Yeah you can get some leeway the job being fully remote I guess but ultimately you aren't reducing headcount as linearly as you seem to imply by going cloud vs on-prem.
Well, they don't, but this is a particularly damning statement and it's age is more of a feature than a flaw because it shows a long history of anti-social disdain for humanity.
Maybe not 25,but IBM Watson beat humans at Jeopardy over 10 years ago. The technology has been there, the difference is the willingness to burn money on it in hopes of capturing exponential revenue from disrupting industries.
Obviously the costs have come down but if IBM felt like burning 100 Billion in 2012 I'm pretty sure they could have a similarly impressive chat bot. Just not sure how they would have ever recouped the revenue.
Nah, IBM watson jeopardy version was a one-off. It was an app specifically tuned for that usecase. IBM Watson is not a single product or app. It is more of a marketing term
Nice that ChatGPT does that, its also true that Google Translate and other APPs have had this functionality for a decade or more. I was getting live German translated on my phone in 2015 with no problems.
Yes, there have been translation apps for along time, but the LLMs are much better. If the phrases can have dual meanings the LLMs will often explain so you end up with a better understanding of what was said/needs to be said. The LLMs can pull more context from the web, so if you're dealing with more complex topics that may have acronyms they are much better at getting to a correct translation.
I have been using google lens heavily to scan posters/flyers/information displays in other languages and get it translated to english in like 2-3 seconds. So freakin helpful.
I'm very similar to the OP here, always hear about ChatGPT rarely anything else. Most people are definitely not paying, but of the few that are paying, outside of software developers, they are all paying for ChatGPT exclusively. I don't know of anyone paying for the basic chat versions of other AIs. A few developers paying for Claude and Gemini, but I know hundreds of people that talk of ChatGPT and no other AI, again most not paying though.
Outside of work I don't know anyone who pays for AI.
But I have noticed that everyone seems to be using ChatGPT as the generic term for AI. They will google something and then refer to the Gemini summary as "ChatGPT says...". I tried to find out what model/version one of my friends was using when he was talking about ChatGPT and it was "the free one that comes with Android"... So Gemini.
It's not something government should regulate but it is something that government policy should incentivize.
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