CanadaPlus @ CanadaPlus @futurology.today

A backup account for !CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org, and formerly /u/CanadaPlus1

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2 yr. ago

Can’t but wonder if the Houthis aren’t used to US and UK bombs being dropped on them by now and if thus this will make that much of a difference (weren’t the Houthis mountain people, same as the Afghans?).

Pretty much what the news analysts are saying, even. I'm unsure why Biden and Sunak felt like this was a good idea. I really can't see any possible upside. Now they look even more crooked in the region than before, because the only thing they acted on are the cargo ships loaded with dumb crap for the West, and the Houthis look cool and relevant directly fighting them. The threat to shipping is even higher than before if anything, and the whole place is even closer to going WWI.

They could have just parked their warships there and kept eating drones. It would have costed a lot in interceptors, but you'd think even a few more weeks of situation normal would have been worth it.

Full disclosure, I'm not convinced personally; I need more evidence it can work.

Okay. I guess I just don't see a political group getting more donations than their opposition as all that nefarious. If you have organised lobbying at all, this has got to be the most defensible kind. I guess I'd support a cap on the amount that can be donated to such a group by any one person.

A lot of this article just rehashes the old anti-MAID arguments, which I suspect is the real motive behind it, and I'll rehash my response: If you don't want people to prefer death to the way they're treated, what exactly is your plan to treat them better? Doing anything else, including limiting their ability to make decisions you're uncomfortable with, is just an added cruelty on top.

Ahem.

When they say every fingerprint is different, are they right? There couldn't be an infinite number of finger print patterns, could there be? If, so how?

It depends how close to each other they have to be to count as the same. They consist of a series of mostly parallel lines, but for the sake of simplicity only focus on just one. It's a curve. A curve has an infinite collection of other curves that are different to any, arbitrarily small degree, and that's even true for smooth curves like we're talking about here, and even if you ignore a finite set of transformations, like moving it or stretching it.

However, the systems that police use to catalogue them have no such infinite precision. If you have a collection of k fingerprints, and there's n possible fingerprints a system could distinguish, the probability of two overlapping is a lot higher than k/n, actually, even if you charitably assume every fingerprint is equally likely. In criminal cases, a little bit of doubt is enough to prevent conviction in a typical Western country. The issue of whether a fingerprint - especially a partial one - is reliable enough evidence a given person was involved has indeed come up before. Off the top of my head, I don't know if it's made the difference in any cases, but I bet it has.

IIRC, it's a big issue because a lot of the systems are proprietary, and the companies don't want to provide defence lawyers with any sort of data on how they work. For all they know, it could be programmed to return a match with a random frequent offender if it can't find anything else. Unfortunately, most judges are tech laymen who see no issue with blindly trusting a magic box, and are very aware that some nasty people could be released if they call said boxes into question, so getting the problem recognised is or was an uphill battle.

If you still want it to render pages, you should go with a Firefox derivative. I'm not sure how minimal you can get while still doing that correctly most of the time. Maybe you could clarify a bit?

Generally, it's envisioned as being a lot like now, but with no classes, and people making and remaking the rules on the fly rather than having set laws and set authorities. No laws, no government, but not no rules.

Which version? If all you need is an uncoordinated, dopey person, I'm right here. /s

If undeath is required, no. It's not even a concept that makes much sense without mind-body dualism, which is all but ruled out scientifically.

Thank you for this enlightening post. I'm truly better for it. (/s, non-salty)

Sadly, that sounds like them.

DNA is a programming language

JavaScript no longer has the worst type system, then.

Jury's out on whether brainfuck or general relativity is more tractable.

Well, that's a bit of a salty tangent, but yeah, I guess they could take a class warfare sort of line on it. The other classical options are going full luddite, or just blaming a minority. Maybe they'll come up with something new, because I have trouble picturing laid off creatives spouting any of these.

Right now, I think people are firmly in the denial stage. For whatever reason the thread isn't federating properly for me, but on beehaw I can see others in here saying human exceptionalism stuff, which is kind of not in accordance with science.

Expect a lot more "white collar workers laid off due to AI" posts coming. I wonder how long it will take for a (very well resourced, those are status-y jobs) movement to form in response.

I second this one. CBT is the current scientific golden standard for when you're your own enemy in general.

Oh no, does this include all hypothetical alternate interpretations of the same code? So, you just look at the screen and go "yep, it definitely could mean something"?

Bro needs to go big. Why not all electronics and electronic systems in general? As it is he could still be "caught with his pants down" by another speculative execution bug.

Yet another broken immigration thing.

I'm annoyed that most of the answers are just "no".

It's actually a great question, but practical experience has shown that closed-source software is just as buggy when written, and only slightly harder for an attacker to figure out, but much much harder to fix. And that's not even talking about deliberate anti-features, like every app that hoovers up your data and sells it so you can order a pizza.

I'd recommend one, but I'd probably just get it wrong.

There, the obvious joke has been made.

With that one, at least your parser should crap itself right around where the error is. You probably just need to search engine the error message, and find the page every other noob has to. Then it won't take too long.

If your thing compiles but doesn't work, then the real fun begins. You're in the magical land of Turing completeness, where you hope the problem isn't unsolvable in your case, because it definitely is in general.

Yeah, no joke. That would be awesome, and they wouldn't be scared off by the paper terrorism.

When Mexico sends us us people, they're not sending their best. /s