OMG now I think about it, Populous is inaccurate too. I think if I was a godlike entity I would do a lot more than raise and lower land all day just to farm manna.

I feel like Jam/Blue Jam was about the zenith of British surreal and nihilistic comedy.

Literally soulseek with ads where some dudes in Stockholm siphon off the lions share of the music industry’s revenues for building a client. The absolute nerve and cheek.

Library Genesis worked pretty great and unmolested until news came out about Meta using it, at which point a bunch of the main sites disappeared off the net. So not only do these companies take ALL the pirated material, their act of doing so even borks the pirates, ruining the fun of piracy for everyone else.

I would hope not.

They wanted access to a faster pipe to slurp 500 terabytes, and that access comes at a cost. It wasn’t about permission.

And yeah they should be sued into the next century for copyright infringement. $4Trillion company illegally downloading the entire corpus of published literature for reuse is clearly infringement, its an absurdity to say that it’s fair use just to look for statistical correlations when training LLMs that will be used to render human authors worthless. One or two books is fair use. Every single book published is not.

Whatever they get sued for would be pocket change.

The brink of world war 3 over fucking goodhart’s law.

We are not a serious species.

When combined with the Peter principle, it doesn’t make for great progress, no.

> isn’t a good look for Nobel, and shows that we’ve now moved so far from the original intention of the prize that the peace component really should be scrapped.

I don't follow. Are you saying the committee should have known that Trump would literally wage a military war if he isn't awarded the peace prize? Are you saying if they changed their mind now and allowed Venezuelan politician Machado to gift her prize to Trump, that Trump would no longer have a desire to own Greenland? I'm honestly trying to understand but maybe I missed an important story.

Well it should be apparent that Greenland is the sovereign territory of another NATO member, Denmark. Coming along like a transactional narcissist and claiming you “need it or else” and breaking nato over it OR you get the Nobel peace prize for not capturing it.

The thing is, they don't "need" to do anything.

This is the prize.

If people find it irrelevant it will become irrelevant.

The committee didn't ask for the US president to put so much relevance into it.

He got the FIFA peace prize. It would be better if he valued that prize higher.

You have to ask yourself. Why is it important for you that they change?

> Right! Either scrap it, or award it only to (A) those recently deceased who have devoted their lives to making peace, or (B) defunct organizations who have completed their mission and had operated in the interests of peace.

The legal trust for all the Nobel Prizes state (AIUI) that they can only be awarded to living persons.

The only option would be to not award it (like happened in 1948).

Another day, another step closer to O.N.A.N. - Organisation of North American Nations - as predicted by David Foster Wallace in Infinite Jest.

DFW, Neal Stephenson, and Idiocracy seemed funny 25 years ago. Not so much now that they seem to have predicted where we have arrived.

> DFW, Neal Stephenson, and Idiocracy seemed funny 25 years ago. Not so much now that they seem to have predicted where we have arrived.

Idiocracy did not predict things accurately: in that movie the President acknowledges that he does not have all the answers and asks questions (and listens) to people he recognizes as knowing more from him. That is not the situation currently.

True. Didn’t predict the president building a Ba’al room for Moloch worship into the White House either.

I have to go back to the source and confirm your analysis. The sheer mental incapacity of the individual cabinet members in the movie most closely matches this current administration than any other cabinet in history as I recall.

Edit: maybe it's predicting the presidency a couple of terms down the line, when a well-meaning Theo Von becomes president. But the Theo Von of today is too smart already, it would have to be the Theo Vom of a decade ago.

Theo Von has many dozens of characteristics that make him much better suited to be president than Trump

I think Obama winning the prize just for winning the election while being black was a very poor precedent to set.

The Obama prize was a problem that haunts the committee. I agree

But you are simplifying greatly. He got it because he reached out to Arabic leader to lower the tone set by George "crusader" Bush.

"The Norwegian Nobel Committee announced the award on October 9, 2009, citing Obama's promotion of nuclear nonproliferation[2] and a "new climate" in international relations fostered by Obama, especially in reaching out to the Muslim world."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Nobel_Peace_Prize

Either way. Stating that you don't care about world peace because you didn't receive a prize. It is a bit childish. I would not let guy near something that requires responsibility. You win some you lose some. Get on with life.

I think the US electing a convicted criminal as President was a very poor precedent to set.

Henry Kissinger though?