Id imagine its Trump himself they think theyre fooling there. Its a gesture that feeds his ego, in the hopes of getting favorable treatment later.

That might mean something if there were any realistic chance that this would result in something better and more democratic, but both given how Trump acts and how US intervention in Central and South America typically goes, odds are that whoever they find will just be a puppet dictator out to extract resources to the benefit of US companies.

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.

As someone pretty new to linux, what’s wrong with snaps? I’ve seen a lot of memes dunking on them but haven’t run into any issues with the couple that ive tried (even had a problem with a flatpack version of a program that the snap version fixed, though I think it may have been related to an intentional feature of flatpacks rather than a bug).

Then if we want fission in 2035, we’ll have to start now. If we want fusion by 2035, we’re probably out of luck because we haven’t even got the tech to the point where we can produce net electricity with it yet (net energy from the reaction yes, but that’s not good enough for a power plant), and once we get that we need to refine it enough to produce enough energy to be worth the cost, and then we have to actually build the power plants. If we want neither, then we’ll probably still be using fossil fuels for a significant percentage of power generation by then, because while solar is cheap and should probably be the bulk of our future energy mix, is isn’t good for some use cases

While I do agree that we should research fusion, it doesn’t really address all the issues of fission. It still has some nuclear waste generation; not from spent fuel but from the reactor walls being bombarded with neutrons, causing some of that material to become radioactive, and it will likely require even more complex facilities and so have the “you need to spend a massive amount of time and money to get a reactor online” economic issues fission has, but possibly even worse. The physics technically give you more energy per amount of fuel and the fuel is more abundant, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the resulting electricity will be cheaper, especially when both systems use so little fuel anyway.

It does avoid the possibility of a runaway reaction/meltdown I guess, but modern reactors are pretty good about avoiding that anyway. For that matter, newer (relatively speaking) fission reactor designs exist that can process waste into more fuel (not forever obviously, the fuel can’t be infinite, but enough to greatly extend the fuel supply and deal with much of the waste issue at the same time). The fission waste issue is also a bit overblown; the actual volume is very low, so just digging a handful of very deep storage facilities to stick it in is a viable option for an extremely long time.

The biggest issue for fission, imho, is that we simply don’t build very much of it. The less of it we make, the smaller the pool of people and facilities that are equipped to run it, maintain it, build the components etc, and the more expensive running it or building more becomes.

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.

Ive only been using linux for a few months and still dont feel confident that I know what im doing except when the gui can do a thing intuitively, so probably that beginning stage, except the distro Ive been using (ZorinOS) isnt on here. I think its based on Ubuntu tho so maybe that covers it idk. Been thinking about trying a different distro to see if its any better but reinstalling all my stuff again sounds like a hassle so I might just stick with the setup I have for awhile longer.

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.

after years and many billions of dollars of technological development, we have finally invented a machine that can be scammed

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?

“saving children’s lives? we can’t have that!” -maga, apparently

Executing someone for being delusional or heavily propagandized strikes me as morally dubious, removing a politician from power achieves a similar effect without having to embrace capital punishment.

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.

They’re not, they’re saying that other people are going to do that, and that them doing so will create problems for unrelated jewish people long into the future.