The good news is that there are other distributions available that don't use snap. And even some that make snap use your choice.

So I don't agree that Ubuntu should get rid of snap. I think it's good that different distributions use different technologies, so each person can find the one that is right for them.

I, for one, have never noticed any problems using Ubuntu (snap included). It all just works, for my uses anyway.

I, for one, cannot see the future and don't know when technological advances will put so many people out of work they cause major economic upheaval. But I think this makes little difference. We should want technological advancement anyway.

I don't think "it will put humans out of work" is a good reason to make tech illegal or to avoid researching it, mainly because "putting people out of work" means "eliminating the necessity of tasks that are so unpleasant we have to pay people to get them done." Eliminating labor is ultimately a good thing in-and-of itself.

When our economic model can no longer function within our technological landscape, then we will need to adapt our economic model. That's how we make life better for everyone. Maybe it is not an easy thing to do. Ok. It is still the right answer.

I don't think we have to get ahead of ourselves and start changing our modern system to accommodate the climate we imagine will result from new tech. It still makes sense to wait and see.

We DO have a homelessness problem right now. Some percentage of the homeless have mental diseases and/or drug addictions that prevent them from being able to get and hold a job, even though there are jobs that would be otherwise available to them. I don't know what that percentage is though. If it is high, then that suggests that there are enough jobs available to cover the populace, and as such tech is not putting everyone out of work. If that percentage is very low, then we may need to look at how many jobs are available and the reason why the homeless population isn't obtaining them. Is it some kind of educational failing, for example? Might there be things we can do to address that? Yes, and a serious effort at doing so is the logical next step, not some sort of alarmist panic reaction to every new tech that shows up.

The Miller Test is a terrible standard of enforcement, as it puts juries in the impossible position of trying to determine what has "literary or artistic value" which is an entirely subjective call. Some people can claim that the human body is beautiful and depictions of it are automatically artistic. Others will claim that any nudity at all qualifies as "prurient" and utterly lacks artistic value. There is no way to be objective about this, as these are entirely a matter of opinion.

The intent here is to filter out "patently offensive" cases. But that's still a problem, as different people have completely different ideas about what qualifies, making all enforcement arbitrary.

The bit about "community standards" is a total trap too as any jury can contain people who live near one another but come from completely different religious and socioeconomic backgrounds, and as such have completely different ideas about what the standards of their community even are. Everyone's idea of what the "average person" considers offensive is entirely biased by their own ideas of what is offensive, and that will swing widely from person to person even within the same community.

So, in short, it's crap, and it leads to uneven enforcement. It sends people to jail for content that is milder than content held by others who walk free, right from the same courtroom. I realize that we need some laws to prevent the distribution of harmful content, but we absolutely need something better than this.

It's good that the open source community offers so many options that everyone can find their favorite. But still, the level of zealotry in the community is so strong it is comical.

I am using Ubuntu. System D has never harmed me. The corporate backing of Ubuntu has never harmed me. It has "just worked" better than the other distros I have tried (Suse long ago, and Fedora slightly less long ago), does everything I want it to do, runs Steam and plays steam games just fine, etc.

Pointing out that the risk is shared by both parties does not, in fact, lower the risk nor the stakes. People will shun a high-risk-high-stakes investment, regardless of whether those risks are fair.

The "traditional marriage," where one member (typically the woman) gives up her career in order to be a stay-at-home spouse, is largely a thing of the past. Most families simply can't afford that arrangement anymore. In this economic landscape, it is almost selfish to want to be a stay-at-home-spouse. The financial burden that such a person imposes is significant, and is multiplied by the even greater financial burden imposed when the divorce happens.

If wealthy men want to seek out traditional women to offer livelong providence (even after divorce), more power to them. It's their money, after all. In a world with a 50% divorce rate, it seems a significant waste to me, but really that's just an issue of values.

The bottom line, though, is that marriage rates won't go up in the current climate. No amount of blaming-and-shaming will have any impact. Maybe that's ok. But people who would like to see the marriage rates rise are going to have to do better than say "you need to learn better." Such a tactic utterly fails to address the reasons motivating the current trends.

When the tech is this awesome, the answer is always "of COURSE we should!!!"

You know, like this.

Same goes with CRISPR. The moment we CAN use it to create mosquitoes and ticks that don't suck blood, yellowjackets that don't sting you for no reason at all, Humans with three eyes for full trinocular depth perception, humans with gills for breathing underwater, humans with gorilla strength, and human-spider hybrids, we absolutely should. In fact, I don't understand why we don't have government funding on these projects already.

The belief that old technicians are unwilling/unable to update their skillset is largely false. Only the bottom-tier of technical talent has such a learning disability. Most technicians can do this easily.

This false belief is used to justify ageism of course, but the real reason motivating ageism is the very true fact that young technicians are much more willing to harmfully overwork themselves than old technicians. New technicians naively believe that all that overwork proves their importance to their employer and secures them a high salary and a secure job. These things are entirely false, and come at a cost of health and life-enjoyment. By the time they learn these lessons the hard way, they have become old technicians who are no longer wanted.

As an aside...

Over the course of my career, I saw businesses adopting technologies which are not very portable and not likely to live very long. The reason is....it was new, cool, trendy, sounded good in marketing, easier to draw tech talent that knows it and wants to work on it. The downside is...they now have a very large application written in technology that has been killed by its own vendor, and the path to upgrading to the new tech is very expensive.

It is still entirely possible to build super-fast, responsive, immersive websites today using ancient tech like the Common Gateway Interface, Apache, HTML/Javascript/CSS, with C++ on the back end. Tech written that way, and written well, can run circles around the bloated third-party-heavy slopped together crap that gets churned out for most websites. BUT nobody wants to use that old tech because it is harder to use (especially C++), takes longer to implement, harder to find talent who are willing to use it, and doesn't confer any buzzword bingo benefits to the marketing team.

So it IS true that tech gets reinvented every few years, and it IS true that everything that was written on the latest tech now needs to be re-written, but it is NOT true that things have to be that way (as there IS a category of old tech that would totally work and work well for these purposes and would avoid the need for re-writes every few years). Most companies just don't have the will to take that kind of long-term view.

In some states, if you witness a crime you have a legal mandate to report. That's it though, you don't have a legal mandate to intervene. Furthermore, in many places you have a legal mandate to flee as well.

Even if there is neither a legal mandate to flee nor to report, if you remain at a party where rape is going on, you are still putting yourself at great legal risk since you could very easily get included in the subsequent round of accusations even if you were not involved. So, even if you broke no laws, you could be found guilty of some by an imperfect legal system. It is therefore in your best interest to get the hell out (and to report as that is likely going to reduce the risk of you being falsely accused as one of the perpetrators).

You, however, seem to be talking about some sort of social/moral obligation to intervene. Is that true? I apologize in advance if I am misunderstanding your post. So from a social/moral perspective I say you still don't have an obligation to intervene unless you have overtly accepted a role of bodyguard. There is no holy law that requires you to risk yourself helping someone else. There may be consequences to inaction, of course. As you said, you cannot "hope it will go away." Hope will have no beneficial outcome. If you want the activity to stop then you have your own incentive to do something about it. And, on the other hand, if you do nothing at all you might wind up with a reputation as a non-hero. But even that doesn't obligate you to do anything at all. It is up to you to decide what outcomes you would prefer, what consequences you are willing to accept, and what risks you are willing to take.

There are ways of protesting genocide that do not involve disrupting business and possibly breaking the law. Such disruptive actions certainly get attention, but they do so at the cost of potential harm to other innocent parties, and so they are not always the best option. The protestors could have chosen peaceful and non-disruptive protests. You are free to praise their obnoxious behavior and consider it justified if you like, but again there is no social obligation for anyone to join you in holding those opinions.

The Geneva Convention does not require any free person to "do everything within our power to stop it."

Nor should it. Even if there are crimes against humanity happening somewhere in the world, I don't owe those victims my life. That's what freedom means. I am not required to stand up and sacrifice myself, my resources, or my efforts on their behalf. The word "duty" is popularly used to manipulate other people to do things. But duty is accepted, not imposed*. Your personal belief that people "should" get involved does not, in fact, obligate anyone to get involved.
Simply put, we do not have such a duty. If we choose to stop something, it is because we have decided for our own reasons to go above-and-beyond on someone else's behalf.

*Governments create laws that require their citizens to do things, and often use the word "duty" to describe that. In these cases, the more accurate term is "legal mandate." But "duty" is used instead as a synonym. This results in equivocation with such uses as "moral duty" or "social duty," which are cases where there is no legal authority imposing the duty and as such individuals are not beholden to it unless they explicitly accept it.

Is Dropbox hiring software developers right now....

You are hung up on semantics. What you said "statistical context models that can form a vague approximation of reality without having the slightest understanding..." qualifies as AI.

The reason we "have AI" is because the definition of "AI" is extremely broad and includes algorithms that do these sorts of things. You seem to be thinking of something VERY narrow and specific, like "AGI" which we don't have. But AGI is different than AI.

The dictionary definition of AI is just something that mimics intelligent behavior, not something that is "actually intelligent." So, computer algorithms don't need to be intelligent or understand things in order to still qualify as "AI."

I know you want the term "AI" to mean something like "conscious, self-awared, thinking machine" but that is simply not what it means. And you pounding your fist and insisting that's what it means will not change this, because in English words get their meanings from popular use. And in popular use, the tech we have now qualifies as "AI."

Checking out films from your local library, however, is not stealing.

It isn't free of course, you pay for that with your tax dollars whether you use the service or not.

So...why not?

It seems clear to me that our social order is already collapsing anyway.

Maybe AI will accelerate that a bit.

Maybe our social order should collapse, so we can replace it with a better one.

I, for one, thought Bladerunner 2049 was awesome through and through.

One thing I liked about it was how they had dialogue sequences that you really had to think about to understand. They didn't just lay everything out for you like simple action flicks do. I found it way more mentally engaging and that's what I liked about it.

I read many online comments written by people who didn't like it and from the things they said it was very clear that they didn't understand it (most of them, anyway). They couldn't follow the plot and just got confused about what was going on, what the motivations where, why this-or-that was done, etc. It really made me feel like the movie was aimed at a smarter-than-average target audience...which is probably the exact reason it didn't do well. That audience is too small.

There is at least one scene in the later books that would be outright illegal to put on film. Depending on how far out the story goes, some cleaning-up is simply required.

On the other hand, making up his own story instead of telling the original stories is just appropriation. It is a temptation for everyone in a creative roll, it is natural for them to want to tell their own stories. Well that's fine, so long as you call it something original and make it completely your own story. If the primary pull of the movie is that it is a big-screen version of someone else's story, then tell that person's story. The more deviation there is, the more the title is an outright lie.

The internet is saying that making Chani run out on Paul was "brilliant." Really? Any idiot can come up with an angry-jilted-lover plotline. Its been done a billion times. The not-so-angry concubine and jealous actual-wife-but-in-title-only plotline from the book is actually unique in that regard. He did have Paul state that he knows she will come around...so....I hope that resolution happens early in Part 3 so the overall plot can get back into alignment with the books.

**Spoilers**

I think there is plenty of material to work with, without damaging the plotlines or the messages. I am keenly interested to see the revelations about the Golden Path, as people on the Internet are saying "Paul is the villain!" and that the water of life corrupted him. It clearly didn't, he was fighting to prevent the extinction of the human race. And, in fact, he was too compassionate to do it. He had to pass that torch to his son who was 50% Fremen badass thanks to Chani DNA.

A lot of people thought the worm-emperor thing was weird. Well, ok, his 3600 year reign can be compacted down with focus on how it ended, how his entire goal was to breed a race of humans who were capable of assassinating him despite his ability to see the future, and how that was the critical element that prevents their extinction. We don't have to dwell on his imperial actions while he was a worm nearly as long as was done in the books. So long as the overall story is there, I think most fans would be ok with simple compression and cutting of the weaker plot elements.