That calcium-loving one that eats your bones if you touch it?

Im beginning to think that, as annoying for users and difficult to build a userbase for as it may be, the answer might ultimately have to be for future social sites to charge people for use in some way, be it to create accounts or as a subscription or just for the ability to post/comment/vote or whatever. If it’s no longer going to be feasible to keep bots out, and there’s a financial gain for their use, then they’re going to get used, so at that point it has to be somehow more expensive to run a bot than that bot can be expected to bring in as a result of it’s contribution to an advertising or manipulation campaign, to deter them. On the bright side, I guess it might lead to a shift away from advertising everywhere. Either you charge people and therefore dont need ads, or you dont, and have most of your ads being “seen” by bots, which advertisers probably don’t want to spend money to reach anyway.

Whenever I see this headline, the pedant in me asks, shouldn’t every interplanetary space mission alter the path of celestial bodies? Like, if we launch a probe away from earth, the mass used to build and generally propel it came from earth and we’ve ejected it from earths gravity well, shouldn’t that give earth a tiny kick in the opposite direction? Or if a gravity assist is used, momentum gained comes from whatever planet we get the assist from. Obviously there’s a big difference in scale given the mass of planets vs asteroids, but still. Do they just mean the first time we’ve been able to actually measure this change, or just not counting missions where this wasn’t the intent behind it?

Ive seen this said a lot here lately, but like, cloud computing still requires computer hardware, so shouldnt an increase in hardware prices make that more expensive as well?

Not to mention, even if it proves satisfactory to the existing userbase, any new users will start with no history to draw inferences from, wouldn’t that tend to imply that any existing users unaffected are essentially “grandfathered in”, but with the same privacy concerns for everyone else in the long run?

It does say “as a baseline” so presumably its just there for comparison’s sake

I wouldn’t say print books have no place today, it can’t be assumed that one will have access to electronics in all circumstances after all and many people do prefer physical media, but it’s definitely an indictment of the sort of cheaply made basically disposable books made in larger quantities than needed to fill their current niche, and of the way unwanted (by their owners) but usable goods are dealt with in general.

Sure, but it is rather a waste of paper, ink, manufacturing and transportation capacity etc. It’s not the only instance of this of course, waste of unsold inventory exists in just about any industry that sells physical products, but it’s still frustrating to see it.

You misunderstand, I am not saying “make sure he spends it responsibly”. Nobody has has “made” him do this at all, and I didn’t advocate for a policy of doing so. What I’m saying is that I don’t think this particular use is worthy of condemnation the way his other actions are, because in the long run I think that this specific thing will end up benefiting people other than him no matter if he intends for that to happen or not (even if the American healthcare system prevents access, which I’m not confident it will do completely, not every country has that system, and it’s statistically improbable that the US will have it forever, and research results are both durable and cross borders). That sentiment isn’t saying that it excuses his wealth, just that I think people are seeing only the negatives in this merely because of the association with Altman’s name and ignoring the potential benefits out of cynicism. The concept is just as valid with him funding it as it would be had he been condemning it instead.

The response to something beneficial being only available to the rich shouldn’t be to avoid developing that thing, it should be to make it available to everyone. The failures of the US healthcare and economic systems don’t suddenly make developing new medical techniques a bad thing. Human augmentation is another issue from curing genetic disease, though I’d personally argue that wouldn’t be a bad cause either, with the same caveat about it availability. It at least has more potential to improve somebody’s life somewhere down the line than just buying a yacht with his ill gotten gains or some other useless rich person toy would.

I’m not sure I get the universal negativity to this. Like sure, Altman sucks as a person, and an individual having enough money to significantly bankroll research like this is a sign of an economic failure, but surely curing or preventing genetic disease is just about the most uncontroversial use human genetic modification could have?

Microbes are still made of chemicals, it’s just different chemicals

and not to mention, the tools required to create it (maybe not the best examples, but still) are already in the possession of virtually everybody.

To be fair, I don’t think I’ve seen most geoengineering techniques, especially the sulfur reflective particles one, presented as not being ecologically disastrous (though the particular damage I’ve previously seen it suggested as likely to cause was different). I’ve usually seen that presented in a “thing to consider if the consequences of warming becomes worse than the consequences of simulating a long term volcanic winter” context, in which case, pointing out that these ideas cause other damage and that their effect isn’t to just revert the climate to what it was isn’t really “debunking” them, it’s just presenting a better picture of what the potential costs and benefits actually are.

I think that the general idea of artificial intelligence in education hold some promise, in the sense that if you could construct a machine that can do much of the work of a teacher, it should enable kids to be taught in an individual way currently only possible for those rich enough to afford a private tutor, and such a machine would be labeled as an AI of some kind. The trouble is, like with so many other things AI, that our AI technology just doesn’t seem to be up to the task, and probably just won’t be without some new approach. We have AI just smart enough for people to try to do all the things that one could use an AI for, but not smart enough for the AI to actually do the job well.

Tbf one if the use cases for display technologies with high pixel density is vr headsets.

Something I do wonder about these laws: could a person self-hosting a private fedi instance that only they have an account on, argue that they meet age verification requirements by virtue of personally knowing the age of the only user? Or at that point would the whole network of federated servers count as the “platform” rather than the instance?

Probably because they didnt go throught the government, which takes a long time to move on anything, and just put pressure on some profit seeking corporations that just want to get a bother to go away, but which also unfortunately have been put in a position of practical power equal to some types of legislation.

First they’d have to get fusion power to produce net electricity, and then for it to produce it economically compared to other sources. We’ve made progress but it’s been decades in the making and I’d be willing to bet will be a few decades more, even if I do expect it to get there one day.

But what’s dystopian about fusion? It’s just another energy source. A bit cleaner than some of the older ones, but not really anything fundamentally different.

States rights was never really an ideal (in general, if it’s wrong to allow something in one state, it’d be wrong to allow it in the rest, after all). It was just a thing to bring out whenever the federal government disagreed with something they wanted but some states didn’t. But now that they control the federal government, it becomes a liability, so they drop it.