rekabis

Any F-35 aircraft, in particular, will be remotely shut down by America, which is why a good Gripen fleet is so vital -- not only are they far better adapted to extreme/arctic environments and need less than ⅛ of the ground and support crews that the F-35 needs, but they also cost a tiny fraction: for the original price of 88 F-35 aircraft - which continues to balloon well beyond that price - we could buy 720 Gripens at full market price. And if made domestically, we could push that price down even further.

Yes, there is also the difficulty of finding 720 effective fighter pilots to fill those seats, but as every single war in history has shown, it’s not technology that wins wars. It’s numbers. Especially in World War II: even though that German Panser and Tiger tanks were by every single metric immensely superior to the American Sherman, that didn’t matter anymore when 10, 20, or even more Shermans crested the hill for every Panser or Tiger that the Germans fielded. The German tanks were simply overwhelmed and taken out by sheer numbers.

But what will make a true difference, in terms of long-term conflict, is asymmetrical warfare. We can blend in with Americans. We know the terrain. We can bog down and bleed the American forces via sabotage and drone warfare. Just like The Ukraine, we can make them pay massively for every kilometre of territory taken.

Which is why people should get a firearms license, and practice frequently. Militias and such are being expanded - join one to learn about proper military doctrine and ways of coordinating effectively with other groups. Make sure you can cross 15 to 25 kilometres of rough ground with a decent load, without being totally wiped at the end. Learn how to operate shortwave and more modern encrypted radios effectively. There is so much the average citizen can do to prepare without needing to be some Alan Ritchson beefcake super soldier.

I feel that it must be, purely owing to how fundamentally ridiculous it is, and how blatantly bigoted it would be if it wasn’t satire.

If it was up to me, I would get Mozilla to hire the author of Tab Mix Plus and to fold that project directly into Firefox.

The only reason why I am running with vertical tabs is because I am running natively-vertical EIZO monitors that are 2k, so I have enough horizontal space to throw up most websites.

Hell, I have just three systems left which are Windows. One is a bare-bones system purely for travel convenience, another is an accounting system for a workflow that cannot (yet!) be translated to another platform, and the third being my Visual Studio / MSSQL dev platform for traditional windows apps (yes, I still support some absolutely ancient VB stuff). None of which I want to virtualize, for various reasons that include physical location.

And the SSDs are backed up daily.

Samsung should not have gotten into appliances. They seem to be singularly terrible in that field. No-one else comes even close to their level of incompetence.

So if these cues are reliable, would it be possible to help children who are born ambiguously intersex? As in, to more effectively determine their developmental gender long before they themselves are aware of it, to more effectively implement the correct surgery needed?

Because right now it’s a roll of the dice, and doctors often get it wrong. Which leads to massive problems of alignment mismatch as they grow into adults.

Think “Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften” for “legal protection insurance companies”. Just one word, complex meaning.

One of the most hilarious pieces of C# code I have ever seen was one where names of all types - classes, methods, objects, etc. - were taken to the logical extreme.

Not camel case. Not snake case. Not Kebab case. Not pascal case.

Literal single words more than several dozen characters long accurately describing the item in question. Some were more than four dozen characters long, all one word.

It was glorious.

Think of it another way:

You are a bricklayer, who is proud to build brick walls that are as strong and as elegant as possible, capable of withstanding earthquakes and vehicle impacts, while using as few bricks as possible and introducing as few flaws as possible. The walls you build can stand for decades without significant maintenance.

Suddenly all the rage centers around a brick-flinging robot that bodily yeets bricks and mortar in a general direction, until the pile is high enough to act as a wall. And everyone goes nuts over that robot, with construction companies firing brick layers hand over fist.

The robot cannot create quality. It cannot create robustness. It cannot create stability or strength or beauty. All it can do is yeet bricks and mortar until something that resembles a wall takes shape, but with none of the advantages of your hand-made work, and all of the disadvantages you spent a career trying to eliminate from your work.

Would you be impressed, excited, or angry?

I centainly wouldn’t be the first two.

At some point that robot will acquire much the same intelligence - and along with it, taste and creativity and skills - as you do. But it hasn’t happened yet, and it likely won’t happen for a long time. Until then, it is a puppet doing its best to imitate things by cribbing everyone else’s homework piecemeal like a lego kitbash from at least 100 different sets, and failing abysmally beneath a thin veneer of “abilities”

I am taking the Apple path: to sit back and let first movers burn themselves out.

Sure, first movers get the first-mover advantage.

But as the old saying goes, while the early bird might get the worm, it is the second mouse that gets the cheese.

Imma gonna keep my finger on the pulse of things and slowly bone up on best practices for AI, but I’m taking a low-energy, low-effort approach to AI until success routes are clear and unambiguous.

You’re welcome.

You’re welcome.

You’re welcome.

With that said, I have always done my research and managed to obtain vehicles which, after maybe some high-importance fixes in the beginning, managed to last another 5-20 years without any other major work done to them.

Hell, aside from oil changes and minor fixes that I did entirely by myself, I got my last car for nearly free and it lasted me a good decade before some idiot with a jacked-up pickup - he couldn’t even see me behind him - backed into me even though I was laying on the horn like crazy.

Besides, anything prior to 2006 is going to be much easier to fix, does not have DRM, and will not spy on you unless it comes with OnStar.

Honestly, the biggest pain point these days is the lack of a true manual clutch, with the full three pedals on the floor. These vehicles are becoming distressingly rare.

Unfortunately we are hurtling into a future where 80+% live lives of grinding poverty with no real viable future to hope for, while another 19% have actual options and resources, and that final 1% exist in unimaginable opulence and wealth that is built entirely upon the labour of the other 99%. As in, true parasites in every economic way.

“Why are we doing this again?” Is essentially “why are we doing this action a second time?”.

“Why are we doing this, again?” Is essentially “please repeat/re-state the reasoning for this path of action”.

A simple comma, but a significant difference.

Luckily I’m awake at the time, relaxed in a sitting position, and have no problem starting back up. I just get “petered out” on an exhale with my trachea fully open and unblocked, just no burning need to inhale at the moment.

Plus, I usually hit a mild panic at the 30-45s point, and force myself to inhale again.

And no, I don’t get sleep apnea. My GP has checked.

Make a graph with two axes.

Vertical is longevity. Throw-away apps at the bottom, software meant to last decades at the top.

Horizontal is how critical the software is. Ad-hoc or experimental or trivial stuff near the origin, financial, medical, or other important software that must never make a mistake to the far right.

AI can sit in the lower left. It is meant to do stuff in the lower left. Let it go nuts there, and have fun with it.

But AI cannot be allowed to touch the top right corner. Up there is the region of destroyed lives if something goes wrong. Sure, rubber-ducky things with AI, let it read the code in that corner, let it suggest optimal structures for you to build. But never let it touch code that’s sitting there.

As for the other two quadrants… “it depends” on your appetite for risk, of AI going so badly off-script that the company is destroyed trying to untangle that hairball. YMMV.

Now if only they could make a senior’s device like this, geared to cheap price and low specs for large font sizes on a wide device with full traditional phone capabilities. Both my parents could use one, they just won’t at a premium price point.

Either it’ll flop so hard that there will be no second gen, or a lot of issues will be corrected in that second gen.

And that includes humans.

At that point, we’re looking at our global population free-fall cratering into the 1-2B range over 1-3 decades, at best. Worst-case is under 500M, with a full reversion back to the Bronze Age or earlier. And a continuing persistent (slower) decline down to a big fat zero.

Not any time within the last decade, I hope. Because that’s borderline gross incompetence.

Now granted, it’s in-app Safari for the iOS Hack app, but still. Not great.

While I would rather see a space elevator bringing most of humanity to offworld arcologies where we can flourish without poisoning ecosystems, we desperately need to get our on-planet population beneath 1B, and preferably beneath 500M.

And projections via the World3/2024 model show us dropping beneath 4B quite rapidly after civilization collapses in the 2040s, and suggesting a significantly non-zero probability of humanity being extinct by 2200. So we’ll get there without tech, just not in the most ideal manner.