And yet, this is of course an extreme example of the broader political project of AI chatbots and LLMs: They are top-down systems controlled by the richest people and richest companies on Earth, and their outputs can be changed to push the preferred narratives aligned with the interests of those people and companies. This is the same underlying AI that powers Grokipedia, which is the antithesis of Wikipedia and yet is being pitched by its creator as being somehow less biased than the collective, well-meaning efforts of human volunteers across the world.
You may already know this, but a lot of everyday people don't. They still think that a computer can't have bias, and if all these tech bros and business leaders are talking about AI then maybe it does make sense to replace our society with an impartial machine. This article is for them.
It's quite insidious, and tbh there's only so much you can do to control how you feel after work. Instead of hoping to feel good every day, I try and set myself up for success on random days where I do leave work with energy.
In my case this means I have 1 or 2 braindead-easy dinners waiting in the wings. Good leftovers I can reheat in the oven, or a meal that takes 2 steps to prepare. If I don't have to worry about cooking dinner, then I have that much more time to dedicate to a hobby when the fancy strikes me.
I once got assigned a work project to add new functionality to the web service of a recently-acquired company.
The meat of their codebase was a single lua file to handle web requests, query value from Redis, and then progressively filter out items in a loop. Of course, because Lua has no continue statement, the file was a long series of if / else blocks. It was clear that the development style was to just keep adding new things to the loop. There were, of course, no tests.
I asked the former CTO of the acquired company (now in a sales) why they went with Lua. His reply was something about how if Lua is good enough for fintech, it should be great for web services. He must have been good in the sales role, because when I learned how much our company paid to acquire this crappy Lua script, my jaw dropped.
Anyway, that's all to say that in my sample size of 1, Luarocks has been the least painful part of Lua.
Since this will be a facility owned by a public university, I think the city would see no property tax revenue from this project. So why should a city trade its health and/or morals for a nuclear weapons datacenter and not even get anything out of it?
Suppose you're in some hypothetical country where torrenting is illegal. The presence of /usr/bin/qbittorrent on your disk could be enough to face charges. Unencrypted /var/log? Maybe they can see you've been running a cryptocurrency miner. There could be plenty of data outside of $HOME on your computer which a cop might try to use against you.
In the most paranoid hypothetical scenario, someone could mount your unencrypted /usr/bin and replace openssl with a compromised version.
Do you have ancestry which can be traced to another country? Look up whether or not those countries have a law which confers citizenship to dependents of émigrés from that country. It still won't be a quick process, so the time to start is now.
For context, my husband and I are following up one such road to foreign citizenship. It's finally time to submit paperwork, and there is a 13 month waitlist just to hand in the documents. Then an estimated 18 months to receive citizenship. This is assuming that the large influx of applicants doesn't balloon the paperwork processing time even longer. According to one employee at the consulate I spoke to, they are dealing with a 300% increase in applications this year.
It looks like the evolutionary advantage is still debated. There's a newer hyopethsis that, because psilocybin evolved during a period of heightened gastropod diversity, it could be defence against snails.
Reminds me a bit of a previous campaign (not DnD). We (the party) spent so much time and attention murdering and threatening our way into a coup against the sickly King that we stopped paying attention to anyone else in the story.
Then in our campaign finale, we flub every single roll to execute the coup, and our whole plan gets hijacked by a more competent NPC to seize power for herself. Queue TPK* while we all get hunted down as traitors.
* Except for the party poisoner. He was happy to spend his life in prison so long as the new government let him brew poisons for use against enemies of the state.
Even if androids could safely navigate and share a space with humans, I'd still not want to risk a 2m tall, several hundred kilo machine tripping over my pet.
No, morse requires a short gap between letters. For example, it would be impossible to tell the difference between -- (the letter m) and - - (the letter t, twice). Then there is a slightly longer gap to delineate the space between words.
Rapiers aren't as heavy or clunky as you're probably thinking. I mean, yes it's heavier than modern sport blades, or the small sword which gained popularity in the 18th century, but as a thrusting weapon, it's still lighter than something like a cavalry sabre. I have twigs instead of biceps, and can fence rapier adequately. The force from an attack should come from your legs, not your arm, so the only time you need to hold a rapier straight is for the split second before a lunge.
The point of balance is only slightly forward of the guard. You can control the tip of a rapier quite capably with just an index finger and thumb.
"Distal taper" is when a blade narrows towards the tip, and it accounts for significant weight savings when compared to a blade of uniform thickness.
But by the 19th century most duels were being fought with pistols. You'd maybe have military officers duking it out with sabres, and the surviving French nobility might still have had a soft spot for smallswords, but firearms were considered more "egalitarian" and representative of the "democratic spirit" sweeping Europe.
From the original 404 article:
You may already know this, but a lot of everyday people don't. They still think that a computer can't have bias, and if all these tech bros and business leaders are talking about AI then maybe it does make sense to replace our society with an impartial machine. This article is for them.