classic story of the US spending millions on developing pens that write in space while the Soviet Union just issued pencils

You used “story”, so I’ll assume you know this is mostly untrue, but for any of the lucky 10k that hasn’t heard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Pen#Uses_in_the_U.S._and_Soviet_space_programs

Stupid long horses. /ref

If gravity could ever overcome expansion, then there would be some period where expansion was happening, but the rate of expansion was decreasing, eventually followed by expansion stopping, then contraction happening and the rate of contraction increasing. There would not be any period in which the rate of expansion was increasing.

(When you throw a ball up, after you release it, there’s a period of time when the ball is moving up, but it’s speed is decreasing, then it reaches the apex, and it start falling down and it’s speed increases until you catch it. There is no period where it upward speed increases.)

Current observations show not just that expansion continues, but that the rate of expansion is increasing.

(Not only has the big bang thrown the ball, but the ball’s upward speed is increasing.)

It’s not Tuesday, but we got TACO!

The TL;DR is that training AI on copyrighted works falls under the Fair Use exemptions in copyright law

This judgement was reversed by the next federal judge that reviewed AI, in the Meta case.

It is far from legally settled whether training is fair use or not.

Source: https://lifehacker.com/tech/microsoft-copilot-for-entertainment-purposes-only

If expansion were caused by “explosive forces from the big Bang”, it’s rate would be decreasing, not increasing.

Since current observations are inconsistent with that, we have to have a different (or at least additional) cause for expansion.

As the universe expands, distances grow, but mass does not. This causes the overall force of gravity to decrease. This means gravity is “losing” and will never catch up. (Gravity is weakening and expansion is growing). But, if it the rate of expansion were decreasing, that would mean gravity was “winning”, and might continue “winning” until it could reverse expansion.

I think current measurements show expansion itself increasing, which means gravity is already too weak to decrease expansion and will continue getting weaker. There’s definitely open questions, but most current observations and models do not point toward the universe ever collapsing back to a single point.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum#Existential_threat maybe

it certainly won’t be anytime soon.

Agreed. I think globally we are still above replacement rate.

Fewer people means fewer mouths to feed, fewer homes to build/maintain and less consumption in general

Yes, but no. As the video I linked points out, because of the time delay you get fewer people with maximum productivity while still needed to support people that have sub-self-sustaining productivity. Eventually, you might get to a smaller population that choose to return to above replacement rate, but the demographic squeeze don’t got away for another 20-30 years. Once it starts you are stuck in a demographic squeeze, it makes it even harder on everyone, making that choice “harder”.

That is a simplification. Sub-self-sustaining productivity doesn’t exactly track with age, and how much it takes to sustain a joyful life varies based on a lot of factors; it sort of tracks downward but can also go up if economies of scale shirk or when a new essential utility is introduced by technology.

“full body autonomy” includes but is not limited to “no one [is] forced to let anyone else use their uterus”. I don’t believe I am sabotaging my own argument, but I’m an idiot, so maybe you just need to be more meticulous in explaining how I am (doing that).

I bring it up because authoritarians often try to restrict bodily autonomy, particularly around uteruses, when trying to do population control (up or down). In fact, while it may not be a acceptable, mainstream view, you don’t have to look to hard to find a USian on the right claiming that abortion must (become/stay) illegal because of the “birth rate crisis”.

Yeah, I’m not worried about running out of humans globally, and I do think immigration is a fine way for a country to choose to maintain their population.

There’s probably something to be said around cultural preservation, and maybe that’s a bit easier for “native born” persons. But, I don’t know the steelman version of that argument, if there is one.

The problem is the encouragement in general

I don’t see why that’s a problem. I think it could come in the form of actual benefits, not a just verbal haranguing / extolling based on (not) having children, but that it’s good for the birth rate to be slightly above replacement and correcting any divergence should be encouraged.

Capitalism contributes, yes. But, if humanity stays below replacement rate, humanity goes extinct.

Also, no matter how you distribute resources, there are periods of life when your productivity is less that what you need to survive. Everyone has this for many years at the beginning of their life, and those lucky enough to live long enough will have this toward the end of their lives, as aging is the disability that comes for us all. The proven method to sustain persons during those periods is to have enough people in their productive years; it generally requires more than the replacement rate. And, if that doesn’t happen, the less productive suffer and die more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufmu1WD2TSk

All that said, I’m against encouraging teenage pregnancy, and for full bodily autonomy – no one should be forced to let anyone else use their uterus.

Depends on the state, but I think mostly yes.

Like many laws, statutory rape is often inconsistently applied. The most likely scenario is that someone with societal power uses it as a lever to impose their will. Cops rarely, if ever, go looking for someone to protect through enforcement of the law.

This is a repost, so I’ll just link to my response there: https://infosec.pub/comment/17474305 (Basically, “we” didn’t; lots for deaths and injuries prevented by pads and helmets.)

AI app: Great picture! That a “fls Brown cup”; it is delicious and fatal!

I thought that was just the Cybertruck, which yes, I wouldn’t drive even if someone gave me one. I’d flip it and buy something else.

I think both the sedan and roadster are okay electric cars, and I think they have enough range I could use them to reduce the amount of gas I burn in my Volt for longer trips.

But, I haven’t really been paying attention to Tesla recently, and Elmu has certainly been looking horrible to me.

it was inherent to the terminal that you can’t position the cursor and select text using the mouse, and also inherent that there are not right-click menus

There may be terminals for which that is a limitation, but with neovim in konsole, I can (left) click to move the cursor or select text and right-click to get a contextual menu.

Separately, the TUI libary we use for RESTMan is Brick and does support mouse events. IIRC we only support mouse-wheel scrolling, but there’s a lot more that is possible.

So, I think it might worth your time to try some TUI alternatives to your GUI environment.

Your larger point that TUI can’t fully replace GUI stands, at least IMO. Even for plain text formats (e.g. dotty) that I want to edit with a fixed-width font, an image (pre)view can be essential to some tasks. I don’t usually find that’s true for coding tasks, but design docs often benefit from charts.

You might in the future. Both vim and neovim are accepting genAI code contributions. There’s a vim-classic fork around, but it is “rolled back” to pre-vimscript9.