Meet one of my former D&D characters: Kronos, master of space and time (chronurgy wizard), accidentally turned himself into a grung while experimenting on frog familiars. Jokes that he is his own familiar now. Also has a frog familiar. Claims it is himself from another timeline. Campaign goal: to recover his lost powers. Secret: is delusional, or is he?

The good news about nukes: they have a shelf life -- most soviet-era nukes needed to be replaced every 12 years, as the loss of fissile material to natural radioactive decay would render them dirty bombs after a certain point. Now don't get me wrong, a dirty bomb still sucks, but it's no nuke.

So when a collapsing Russia is hypothetically selling nukes, they're probably selling old depleted nukes or nearly expired nukes. To a terrorist it is almost the same thing, but to nation stations looking at MAD, it really isn't.

Not in favour of the individual suffering here, but illegal mining is about the worst thing that can happen anywhere.

Furthermore, in most jurisdictions where illegal mining happens, you get these gang run pyramid scheme shenanigans going on where the miners are very nearly enslaved to their handlers. Shutting them down can only be a good thing!

On the larger scale: Environment and safety regulations exist for a reason.

That said, the suckers in the mine starving themselves to avoid arrest might not see it that way.

Probably the money paid for whomever Alex Jones lost lawsuits against -- so like Sandy Hook victims.

Did you take physics in high school (or elsewhere) and learn about half lives? Many of the main ingredients in nuclear weapons all have half lives: tritium, plutonium, etc -- and most have fairly short half lives. They need to be continuously produced, enriched, refined, etc. to keep the purity high enough to be detonated. Some of them require breeder reactors and other fun thing.

Well, okay, U235 has a half-life of 700 million years, but you still need to enrich uranium to increase to proportions of U235, since U238 cannot sustain a chain reaction.

The original nuclear weapons were U235 weapons. Later bombs added all the harder to make stuff to make them bigger -- fusion bombs still usually have a U235 starter to get the reaction going, but rely on things like tritium and plutonium to do the fusion bits. Even the Lithium-6 (which is stable) slowly decays to helium and tritium inside the weapon as neutrons from the other components hit it.

Anyway, enjoy the Wikipedia rabbit hole.

I love hitting these things in the real world. Not the big, but the comment. You just know someone spent a fortune in time and company resources to never solve the problem and their frustration level was ragequit. But then something stupid like adding

while (0){};

Suddenly made it work and they were like, fuckit.

Usually it's a bug somewhere in a compiler trying to over optimize or something and putting the line in there caused the optimization not to happen or something. Black magic.

The downside is that the compiler bug probably gets fixed, and then decades later the comment and line are still there...

https://xkcd.com/979/

All this shows is that other countries (China, etc.) will have carte blanche if they have nukes. If they don't, they'll get them. Imagine a nuclear armed Venezuela going after their neighbours because conventional intervention is too risky suddenly. Blah.

The ideal result? LLMs are just early versions of much better things that come later.

The unlikely result: we develop a separate human curated internet somewhere, complete with verification that a human wrote every bit. Basically verifiable digital id and signing on everything. Maybe.

The probable result: the internet turns to shit as AIs are trained on content created by AIs.

Atwood is also one of the sanest centrist voices I've ever read, in essays and interviews. (Centrist by Canadian standards -- probably quite left by US standards). She always seems to be acutely aware of institutional inertia and how things like independent courts are vital to free societies. Wish there were more like her.

Duck typing is the best if fully embraced. But it also means you have to worry just a little bit about clean failures once the project grows a little. I like this better than type checking relentlessly.

It also means that your test suite or doctests or whatever should throw some unexpected types around now and again to check how it handles ducks and chickens and such :)

I don't use mate, but assuming that it has a file manager and that file manager has hotkeys that conform to the muscle memory that is built using other file managers... Try it and see what happens?

Generally speaking, I like duck typing for function inputs, but not as much for function outputs (unless the functions are pure mathematics).

How did you switch to Azerbaijan?

Shift-del

All I'm hearing is complaining. It's open source. Fix mate then so it does what you want.

Well, that's on mate then. In KDE you could remap to a combo of your choice with ease

I bet this is a falling out with Hasbro execs on royalties. BG3 royalties were a cash cow this year for Hasbro, pushing Wizards (as a division) to be quite profitable, while almost all other divisions in their company lost money.

So now the agreement is over, and Larian is like: we will own the IP on our next project instead of paying $90M to Hasbro... And fair enough -- they've shown they can kick ass. Hasbro is probably gambling that it's the IP that made the money, and not Larian being magic in a bottle as a developer. So they'll kick tires on selling BG4 to another studio.

BG3 will go down in history as the legendary game before enshittification. Larian will make a few great games that don't sell as well -- before selling out to a whale that dumps money on the owner's front lawn (see also BioWare). The devs who made BG3 will found indie studios and make cool shit for a decade or two. So the wheel turns.

LKML and patch: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=0fc810ae3ae110f9e2fcccce80fc8c8d62f97907

He cites his work as being a variant of a patch submitted by another developer, Josh Poimboeuf. It's a team effort folks :)

This sounds like the sort of infrastructure project the Linux Foundation should be supporting.

Utility corridor. Sometimes a "Right of Way".

Depending on where you live, "hydro lines" or "transmission lines" or similar.

When fascists say they're going to do something, it's probably a good idea to believe them. When they say they won't do something, they'll probably do that too.

When I was part of the KDE marketing working group, we always talked about 5% being the magic number. If we hit that, then the avalanche of ported and supported third party software starts. It's a weird chicken and egg thing. Looks like we're close!

I remember it and was there, on the KDE side of it. Summarized half-remembered version.

Corel WordPerfect had been ported to linux late in the 90s and they got this notion that people only bought Windows to use MS Office. So if they made their own OS, people would buy it just to use WordPerfect. They had grand plans to take KDE and linux and package it as a consumer grade OS. The closest other competitor doing that at the time was Caldera, and they were seeing some success, so why not eh?

They hired two people to "fix" KDE. But the people they hired had no idea how open source worked -- how to interact with a community that functioned more like a meritocracy than a managed hierarchy. They showed up on the mailing list and tried to make demands -- work on this, fix these bugs, adhere to our standards for this other thing, etc. When KDE didn't jump to their whimsy, they sort of got annoyed and just decided to maintain a patchset or something.

The distro flopped hard. And it started with their management. They could have instead hired a half dozen KDE developers that were already contributing, started feature or bug bounty programs (like Google Summer of Code, which was great but came later), and possibly have pulled something amazing together.

Somehow they included Great Salt Lake. It is a "great" "lake" ;)

But they left out Great Slave Lake, and Great Bear Lake because they don't know Canadian geography. ;)

You have python. You import antigravity. The princess flies off into space. You monkey patch the princess so she has wings.

NSFW, but the next obvious thing to do is...

https://www.xnxx.com/search/Josephine+Jackson

Tron: Legacy soundtrack comes preloaded

4D conspriacy theory: was actually killed by Airbus, because the negative press for Boeing will push the Airbus stock price up...

I feel bad for the guy. This is going to put a wet blanket on future whistleblowers, regardless of the actual cause.

I've done a bit of C++ coding in my time. The feature list of the language is so long at this point that it is pretty much impossible for anyone new to learn C++ and grok the design decisions anymore. I don't know if this is a good thing or not to keep adding and extending or whether C++ should sail into the sunset like Fortran and others before it.

I read the article, and it's hard to see how this would have worldwide effects. If anything, the companies with customers in the UK will: disable E2EE for chats with UK parties (likely warning the parties); leave the UK market rather than weaken their brand; or create a secondary product just for the UK. Consumers will continue to find workarounds provided the phones and computers are not fully controlled by the government.

The fact that the government would have to force client side scanning software onto phones and computers is probably the death knell of the UK tech industry. Either that, or so many exceptions will need to be added that the legislation would be ineffective. Can you imagine a Linux hacker recompiling their own kernel and then getting thrown in jail because they didn't enable the government scanning module?

Yes. Best thing we can do is be ready (from a tech perspective) and welcoming (from a human perspective). They'll come or they won't.

Compared to summer, Lemmy now has thousands more users, hundreds of active communities (no where near Reddit yet on niche subjects), actual made-on-lemmy content in a bunch of places, and a bunch of apps that mostly have the bugs worked out. It's probably fair more appealing now to join than it was in summer.

We still have roadblocks: general confusion about federation (the email analogy seems to be working best), difficulty properly explaining how to sign up, a harder time finding communities, and it's impossible to migrate between instances without starting fresh.

Largely, this is likely a good thing. Don't let perfect be the enemy of better (than the status quo).

Scientist piping in with my two cents. Granted my speciality is geophysics and planetary science, and not specifically climate.

In geoscience we tend to talk about things on very long timescales. Like: at what point with the sun's output cause the earth to turn into Venus (250 million years as a lower bound, ish, then all life is doomed on Earth). The rate of change we've applied to our atmosphere is faster than any natural process other than a meteor strike or similar event. There are climate change scenarios where all life on the planet dies (why wait 250 million years!?), but they're mostly improbable unless we have some sort of runaway feedback mechanism we've not accounted for. 2/3 of humans dying is also unlikely. Coastline and ecosystem disruption are almost certain though.

The thing about humans are: we are frighteningly clever. We can build spacecraft that can survive the harsh environment in space and people survive there. As long as climate change doesn't happen "too fast" (values of "too fast" may vary), we will engineer our way around it. On the small scale: air conditioning; and on the larger scale, geo-engineering (after accumulating sufficient political will). We're so clever that, if we (or our descendants or similar) can probably even save the earth in 250 million years when the sun's output passes the threshold where it wants to fry us -- assuming we survive that long.

That doesn't detract from her statement. But it is the Mirror, and the headlight is trying to be incendiary.

Easier to infiltrate terrorist networks -- networks are, well, networks. Most school shootings are independent actors, even if radicalized online.

Now, if you're asking about why they haven't implemented decent gun control laws...

Wow, you're the most entitled user of free software I've met in a while. Just buy a windows license next time.

I don't think any scientist, no matter how reasoned, could adequately answer this question -- because it'll boil down to semantics over the definition of "free will", then devolve into solipsism. A better headline would be something like: "Renowned biologist argues his belief in lack of free will."

The composition is bothering me. Like, it's asymmetrical and there's probably an angle down the centreline of the coliseum that would work better and...

If we're in string freeze, it's probably within a few weeks. They're in bug squashing and translations mode now. I'd take that bet.

Maybe they want to avoid java coding patterns. FactoryFactoryGenerator kind of stuff. Maybe they want to teach their own java coding patterns and want someone coming in with a blank slate so they don't have to unlearn habits. Maybe they're tired of diploma mill programmers applying and are using this as a resume filter tripwire.