Teach everyone to fish, and they’ll deplete the fish stocks and all go hungry

“This is not who we are” is not a literal statement. I wouldnt make any sense taken as one, since its used in response to news of actual events rather than hypotheticals, and if taken literally, it would be very similar to “I am not doing what I am currently doing” which is paradoxical.

Rather, it is a statement to others of ones group that their behavior is problematic and therefore that they should stop it, using an emotional appeal that invokes values those problematic members of the group are expected to profess to have.

Theyve looked a bit daunting to set up, so not just yet. But isnt that effectively the same thing, still running windows for those programs just without having to actually sign out of the linux partition to do it?

I have some software that doesnt work with wine or anything else the like Ive tried, and doesnt seem to have a linux equivalent that I can find. Ive only been using linux a few months now, so maybe theres some other options that Im missing, but how else does one deal with that apart from booting back into the old windows install whenever I need that specific software?

For how long though? The issue with detecting AI generated stuff, Id imagine, is that a picture contains a finite amount of information, especially a digital one. These things have been improving relatively quickly, and I cant think of any fundamental reason why one could not eventually create images where every pixel is as it would be if that image were real, or at least close enough that detection is not even theoretically possible if you dont have some actual proof that the event depicted couldnt have happened. We may not be there yet, but the closer we get to it, the more prone to error and therefore less useful any detection algorithm must be.

I think I’ve encountered one person that could reasonably be said to be using AI generators to make art, in that a discord server I’m in used to have a guy that made something of a hobby out of trying to get chatbots and coding AIs to make “shaders” (I don’t know exactly what this implies, since what he posted weren’t recognizable as shaded images but some kind of abstract patterns or shapes). He was always talking about tweaking some technical aspects of various models, that I didn’t really get the terminology of to understand, and seemed to spend a lot of time messing around with them to only occasionally get something he found interesting enough to share. It wasn’t how people typically use “AI art” generators though, for sure.

Quite the exaggerated headline from the look of it.

I’ve heard of some bakery somewhere doing “recycled bread”, where they supposedly take the leftover bread that didn’t sell that day, dry it out, grind it up, and mix it with fresh flour to make new bread, but I don’t know for sure if the story is real.

I think drone warfare so far has shown that one of the advantages of drones, for a weapon, is their ability to be produced cheapy, en masse, and with a relatively limited manufacturing infrastructure. Assuming you have the computer parts anyway, which are abundant in today’s society. One of the implications of that, I think, is that in future asymmetric or civil wars and the like, they’re not going to be like fighter jets or tanks, where one side will have them and the other must improvise countermeasures. They’re going to be like guns and explosives, where both sides are going to have access to at least some degree.

I work in a factory in the US, and the vast majority of my coworkers at least don’t appear overweight. Granted, a pretty big percentage of them are immigrants, so maybe that skews the numbers compared to the general population.

Even there though, what is the actual point of a phone app controlled smart toilet, even if you open sourced the whole thing? Unlocking one’s phone and tapping the app icon, and then presumably a button on the app, is going to take more time than one press of a lever that one is right next to anyway, and the latter doesn’t present as many points of failure.

If the violence actually stops that and doesn’t just become a symbolic victory where the fascists get to keep the laws they passed at the cost of a punch at the legislative floor, sure. But that wasn’t my point. I wasn’t saying “violence in politics is a bad thing to consider under any and all circumstances”, but “if a country has reached a level of polarization where even the members of its governing body feel the need to resort to that with eachother, things have already gone wrong”. It’s a symptom of a serious problem coming to light, not the problem itself, in other words.

To be fair, there is precident for things to escalate to physical violence on the floor of the US Congress. It was just in the lead-up to the civil war, is all. Arguments getting so heated that legislators can’t resist the urge to just beat up the other guy probably are a bad sign for a country.

Cells are basically the self replicating nanobots that sci fi sometimes has as an example of highly advanced technology, but naturally occurring.

Has this kind of thing literally once in history ever ended well?

I dont think Putin would let him nuke Ukraine. Beyond issues with it being on their border, and their own military forces occupying part of the country, a missile launched from the US towards Ukraine is going to look a whole lot like one launched from the US towards Russia, at least at first, and the nature of nuclear conflict is such that you generally would launch your own missiles when you see your rival’s missiles coming, rather than waiting to see where they land. Trump seems to care what Putin wants, and nobody is going to want their main rival, even if their leader is currently one you have influence over, to be launching nuclear missiles in the direction of one’s country.

The EU is even less likely, since France is both one of its most prominent members and a nuclear power itself.

To be fair, paper does technically have some intrinsic value, it isnt free to create, nor entirely without practical uses. Its intrinsic value is just very low.

The thing about nihilism that some people dont seem to get is that if nothing matters, it matters equally as little if you do just do things and live your life as if you dont. Nihilism isnt a reason not to do anything just as much as it isnt a reason to do anything.

A hostage implies the purpose of holding that person is as leverage to extract some concession from someone, whereas a prisoner does not necessarily imply that intent and could be held for any reason?

I suspect that we might not use the term “dwarf planet”, were it not that the objects we initially created the category to describe were originally classed as planets. The category labelling is a bit arbitrary, we just discovered that what we now call dwarf planets are quite abundant and that there was a clear line that could be drawn to distinguish them from the rest of what we called planets, and so decided to draw that line between them.