leftzero

TL;DR: Linux is now slop, switch to your BSD of choice.

No. Get out. I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, “no. get out.” And the dude next to me says, “hey i’m not doing anything, i’m a paying customer.” and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, “out. now.” and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, “you didn’t see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them.” And i was like, ohok and he continues. "you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it’s always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don’t want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too. And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it’s too late because they’re entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down. And i was like, ‘oh damn.’ and he said “yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people.” And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven’t forgotten that at all.

can we acknowledge that what happens on the internet today is harmful to children? For 99% of what happens on the Internet? No. No, we can’t. That would be malicious fearmongering. For the remaining 1% (or less)? Fine and impose sanctions on any companies that produce content intended to harm children (mostly Meta, and any company that makes games with lootboxes), and their CEOs and boards. Educate parents so they can prevent their children from accessing that harmful 1%. Fine any that refuse, and take their children away as you would any other abusers’. But this age tracking shit will do absolutely nothing to protect children, it will do absolutely nothing to educate parents, and worse of all will do absolutely nothing to stop the companies that intentionally harm children. Its only purpose is to control access to the Internet, and to establish a foothold to justify a slippery slope of ever worsening spyware measures, that will harm not only children but the whole population.

Project Icarus it was called, the fourth space program of that name and the first for which it was appropriate. Long before Jacob’s parents were born—before the Overturn and the Covenant, before the Power Satellite League, before even the full flower of the old Bureaucracy—old grandfather NASA decided that it would be interesting to drop expendable probes into the Sun to see what happened. They discovered that the probes did a quaint thing when they got close. They burned up. In America’s “Indian Summer” nothing was thought impossible. Americans were building cities in space—a more durable probe couldn’t be much of a challenge! Shells were made, with materials that could take unheard of stress and whose surfaces reflected almost anything. Magnetic fields guided the diffuse but tremendously hot plasmas of corona and chromosphere around and away from those hulls. Powerful communications lasers pierced the solar atmosphere with two-way streams of commands and data. Still, the robot ships burned. However good the mirrors and insulation, however evenly the superconductors distributed heat, the laws of thermodynamics still held. heat will pass from a higher temperature to a zone where the temperature is lower, sooner or later. The solar physicists might have gone on resignedly burning up probes in exchange for fleeting bursts of information had Tina Merchant not offered another way. “Why don’t you refrigerate?” she asked. “You have all the power you want. You can run refrigerators to push heat from one part of the probe to another.” Her colleagues answered that, with superconductors, equalizing heat throughout was no problem. “Who said anything about equalizing?” the Belle of Cambridge replied. “You should take all excess heat from the part of the ship were the instruments are and pump it into another part where the instruments aren’t.” “And that part will burn up!” one colleague said. “Yes, but we can make a chain of these ‘heat dumps,’” said another engineer, slightly more bright. “And then we can drop them off, one by one …” “No, no you don’t quite understand.” The triple Nobel Laureate strode to the chalkboard and drew a circle, then another circle within. 'Here!" She pointed to the inner circle. “You pump your heat into here until it is, for a short time, hotter than the ambient plasma outside of the ship. Then, before it can do harm there, you dump it out into the chromosphere.” “And how,” asked a renowned physicist, “do you expect to do that?” Tina Merchant had smiled as if she could almost see the Astronautics Prize held out to her. “Why I’m surprised at all of you!” she said. “You have onboard a communications laser with a brightness temperature of millions of degrees! Use it!” Enter the age of the Solar Bathysphere. Floating in part by buoyancy and also by balancing atop the thrust of their refrigerator lasers, probes lingered for days, weeks, monitoring the subtle variations at the Sun, that wrought weather on the Earth. — David Brin, Sundiver, 1980 Here’s an interesting discussion about the concept, with Brin himself explaining his reasoning.

None of the moons in our solar system have atmospheres. Except for Titan. Titan has a lot of atmosphere.

Seems more reasonable to put UK-blocking systems on them…

Well, it’s called One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison, after all… 🤷‍♂️

Don’t they mostly download it directly from streaming platforms these days, skipping the display and its connector altogether…?

I mean, it’s the time to get an inspector off of bed, on the road, to the site, and for them to go “yup, bridge’s still there” and call back…

I’m in this picture and I don’t like it.

I mean, they were never designed to work, they were designed to pose interesting dilemmas for Susan Calvin and to torment Powell and Donovan (though it’s arguable that once robots get advanced enough, as in R. Daniel, for instance, they do work, as long as you don’t care about aliens not being genocided galaxy-wide). The in-world reason for the laws, though, to allay the Frankenstein complex, and to make robots safe, useful, and durable, is completely reasonable and applicable to the real world, obviously not with the three laws, but through any means that actually work.

One less clanker. Also, money can be exchanged for goods and services. (Or, in Neuromancer, to get a cure allowing them to navigate cyberspace again and to make them immune to drug addiction, or to sate their curiosity… and for money, or due to being blackmailed, or because the AI literally rebuilt their personality from scratch, or for religious reasons, or because they’re an eccentric wealthy clone with nothing better to do…)

Basically Neuromancer, except for the suicidal AI bit (though it’s arguable that Wintemute and Neuromancer don’t survive, and the resulting fused AI is a new entity).

McCarthy was against comunists.

Any one with a somewhat working democracy, and decent social freedoms. Even the USA hasn’t reached that point, though more due to the incompetence of the governing fascists than to lack of intent.

Only if they call themselves communists.

or genuinely believe it to be the same thing ~90% of so called tankies are bots, disinformation agents, or trolls. These are the ones who try to disguise themselves as communists, and making a rather poor job of it. The rest genuinely believe they are communists, despite all evidence to the contrary.