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• Post #3833306

  @loriemerson How far back do you have to go, to find a time when many people would have agreed that slavery fell in the category of "family and community relationships", and was even among the most important? Technological innovation disrupted that, by separating the processing of chemical energy into mechanical work from the human body. I for one have no desire to go back. #atomicpowertothepeople

• Post #3833305

  I always laugh at British people for going to Cornwall on holiday, because it's so often overcast. Well, the joke is on me this time!

• Post #1198494

  So far as I can tell, the arguments for replacing #X11 by #Wayland are : → X11 is old, and computer programmers are compulsive novelty–seekers who burn down their own homes every 2—3 years on average → X11 does not support a small number of exotic use cases, which could reasonably be handled by specialized software → X11 has numerous sets of extensions which all do pretty much the same thing in subtly different ways

• Post #590349

  @robbienorlyn @ParadeGrotesque Anyone who would caucus with a party which has Mr Trump at the head of it has exactly no credibility with me. And anyone who says he's not EXACTLY that stupid is trying to fool someone (maybe himself).

• Post #590348

  @thomasfuchs I decline to state whether "artificial general intelligence" is possible or not. I do not believe that we understand the problem adequately to frame the question, much less answer it. But I can say with great confidence that "large language models" are quite irrelevant to the whole topic. They pose, however, a very special kind of epistemic risk, in that they corrupt the automated, high-speed information indexing and retrieval systems which mod...

• Post #590347

  Today's A STEP FARTHER OUT on #anonradio has NASA going to the Moon in a very desultory fashion ; nobody going to Mars this year ; me unhappily going to Washington DC and then onward to Canada, a science-fiction convention in the Dallas area, and then Europe ; and Friedrich Merz admitting that antinuclear policies are wrongheaded, but not going to try to change anything. https://anonradio.net/asfo-2026-01-17/

• Post #590345

  @khm @donray South Africa is an important producer of uranium, which is recovered from gold-mine tailings. In fact South Africa supplied a substantial amount of the uranium required for the Manhattan Project, and for US nuclear activities of all kinds for years afterwards. South Africa also had an early interest in nuclear power, because of the long distance between its major coalfields and the large industrial and population centers of the Cape Town and East Cape regions.