because you can’t call from this thing or communicate with it any other way because it’s receive only

Yes, it’s a pager. Pagers are still useful, that’s why they’re still being manufactured and sold. Someone in IT who’s on call can have a pager set up so that an automated process sends them a notification if a system breaks. They don’t need two-way communication for that. A doctor can use one to be notified if they’re needed at the hospital. It’s more reliable than a cell phone and in many cases the battery lasts a lot longer. They could even be useful for a parent to give to a kid, so that the parent can get in contact with the kid and have the kid call home if something happens. In rich countries that could happen because the parent doesn’t want the kid using the device all the time to scroll TikTok. In poorer countries it could happen because a pager is much, much cheaper than a phone.

The fact that thousands of these devices were exploded suggests that it was a pretty wide group of people who were using them, so the odds are pretty good that at least some of them were given away / sold.

If the device in my pocket started smoking like that, I’d throw it away pretty quickly. I suspect these were actual explosives, and there are almost certainly more of them out there.

The scary thing about a supply chain attack is that Hezbollah aren’t idiots. This is basically like buying a “burner phone” (that name will now have different connotations now).

In the movies, people buying burner phones go to a random corner store and buy a random phone off the shelf. That way, even if they’re under surveillance, the cops / CIA / FBI can’t pre-bug the phone because they don’t know which corner store the person’s going to go to, let alone which phone they’ll pick off the shelf.

If you’re an armed group in Israel’s crosshairs, you’re going to take similar precautions when buying thousands of pagers. The safe way to do it would be to slowly and unpredictably get a small sample of ones that are being sold to the general public. If this is true, it could mean that there are tens of thousands of pagers out there that contain explosives that were merely sold as “decoys” in order to try to make Hezbollah feel safe in buying them. In other words, there may be tens of thousands of explosives in pagers that weren’t activated because they weren’t in the hands of Hezbollah when Israel decided to hit the button.

Also, how many pagers are still out there with explosives in them?

Option 1: Israel blew up all the pagers containing explosives, regardless of whether they’d been sold / passed on to family members, friends, or other people who had no connection with Hezbollah, so many of the thousands of injured were innocent bystanders.

Option 2: Israel got the pagers into the hands of tens of thousands of people, then only blew up the ones that were actually in Hezbollah possession, leaving thousands of pagers out there containing explosives.

Knowing Israel, it’s almost certainly option 1.

Lithium batteries burn, they don’t suddenly explode.

Many pagers, each with a small explosive inside? What’s hard to get?

Your well come.

I miss Allie’s blog alot.

Noone should of aloud this code to go out the door. Atleast alot of other people people probably complained aswell, so your apart of a bigger group, incase you were worried.

COBOL

What about the Nazi-sponsored English motor-racing legend, Dick Seaman.

Which is what the game of monopoly was designed to teach.

And the banks, and the oil companies.

And there’s a better reason for wanting to delay definition updates: this outage.

I’m only eyeballing graphs, but from this one, a Toronto detached house in 1999 was roughly $300k, and today it’s roughly $1.7m. That matches about a 7% annualized rate of return. A document from S&P Global says the TSX index has grown at an 8% annualized rate.

A house you buy as an investment might slightly lag behind an investment in an index fund. But, if you have to pay rent because you’re not living in your investment house-purchasing seems to win by a long shot.

It’s the sunk cost fallacy.

Houses shouldn’t be primarily thought of as an investment

Not only should they not be thought of as investments, they shouldn’t go up in value like investments. A house should slowly depreciate over time. Because of inflation, the dollar-value of the house should maybe go up, but adjusting for inflation it should go down. If you do repairs, maintenance, etc. then maybe it should more or less hold value. If you do a renovation, maybe it should go up in value. But as a structure that gets slowly damaged by the passage of time, it should slowly go down in value.

What’s ridiculous is that someone who made a solid $200k investment 25 years ago and then lived in a small apartment is worse off than someone who simply bought a $200k house and lived there.

If housing keeps going up in value then pretty soon the only people able to live in a house will be the ones inheriting one.

It would definitely accomplish something. It’s not clear if that would necessarily be a positive thing, but it would definitely be a pivotal moment in history. Even just the attempted assassination might eventually be seen as pivotal.

The right-wing is full of so many contradictory forces, and right now it’s only Trump’s cult of personality that’s holding them together. It seems very likely to me that post-Trump they’re going to fracture. If Trump becomes dictator he’ll probably groom Don Jr. to succeed him, and he’ll eliminate anybody who might question that decision. But, right now, Jr. is not in a position to take over from dad, so if Trump were no longer in the picture, there would be a power vacuum and massive infighting.

But, if the assassination attempt had succeeded, there would probably have been a lot more political killings, and just violence in general.

The CBC is a big part of the reason Canada isn’t as messed up as the US.

Canada has for-profit media and plenty of media that leans left or right. But, CBC exists to anchor that media universe with a boring, institutionalist, honest view.

I mean alledgedly ChatGPT passed the “bar-exam” in 2023. Which I find ridiculous considering my experiences with ChatGPT and the accuracy and usefulness I get out of it which isn’t that great at all

Exactly. If it passed the bar exam it’s because the correct solutions to the bar exam were in the training data.

The other side can immediately tell that somebody has made an imitation without understanding the concept.

No, they can’t. Just like people today think ChatGPT is intelligent despite it just being a fancy autocomplete. When it gets something obviously wrong they say those are “hallucinations”, but they don’t say they’re “hallucinations” when it happens to get things right, even though the process that produced those answers is identical. It’s just generating tokens that have a high likelihood of being the next word.

People are also fooled by parrots all the time. That doesn’t mean a parrot understands what it’s saying, it just means that people are prone to believe something is intelligent even if there’s nothing there.

ChatGPT refuses to tell illegal things, NSFW things, also medical advice and a bunch of other things

Sure, in theory. In practice people keep getting a way around those blocks. The reason it’s so easy to bypass them is that ChatGPT has no understanding of anything. That means it can’t be taught concepts, it has to be taught specific rules, and people can always find a loophole to exploit. Yes, after spending hundreds of millions of dollars on contractors in low-wage countries they think they’re getting better at blocking those off, but people keep finding new ways of exploiting a vulnerability.