I meant active computing.

As long as those robots keep thinking with their tiny sixties electronic brains, they're as close to humanity's living children outside of the solar system.

When they stop thinking, sure, they'll carry data for aeons for someone or something to discover one day maybe, but no differently than a dead body would carry information in a side pocket. It's useful but it's not alive anymore.

I might very well stop thinking before they do. I'm a few years away from retirement and I smoked for 25 years. So it's certainly not impossible.

Who needs Doom when we have Duke Nukem...

Need to be celebrated loudly and publicly - those who are still alive.

The engineers who keep this thing going too.

The Voyager probes are literally part of my life. I've always known them. For me, they're a fixture of the sky like the Sun and the Moon. They're precious little bits of living humanity far out there. If they die, something inside would die too, and I sure hope I kick the bucket before they do.

Almost certainly not. It's likely open-source distributed training using people's spare computing in a manner similar to BOINC (if not within it) will pop-up for free-model enthusiasts to continue developing such models.

That, right there, this very start of a sentence, is where the entirety of the nonsense right-wingers wave around when it comes to this topic, start. Why don't all "I'm not a psychiatrist, but..." people go and check what the actual psychiatrists say on the matter?

Here's a good starting point. This is what the largest psychiatric organization in the world, the American Psychiatric Association, composed of 37,400 registered psychiatrists, and responsible for the DSM, the manual used for the diagnosis and treatment of mental issues in the US and who doubles a core source for the ICD, the general illness diagnostic manual used worldwide, says: What is Gender Disphoria? # Treatment.

No need for "I'm not a psychiatrist, but...", the actual psychiatrists have spoken.

As have done, for that matter, the actual psychologists through the 157,000-members strong American Psychological Association: Transgender Identity Issues in Psychology. So no need for "I'm not a psychologist, but..." either.

I know you're trolling, but these feel like interesting questions on their own, so I'll bite:

That'd fit my "there's some of a gray area in this". It's the kind of situation in which a thorough investigation of the details would be needed. For example, such extremely voracious hunger would suggest the person suffers from extreme polyphagia, on a level approaching that of Tarrare. If that was the case, then it'd be a strong mitigating factor in any punishment.

In the above example, pitied is more the term. And then, ideally, lead to an inquiry on why and how the State failed addressing his extreme medical needs, and on how to fix that failure mode, followed by such fixes being adopted.

if he hadn't posted in the Fediverse through fucking Facebook. I would have been more impressed if he had done it directly on Mastodon or Lemmy.

This is sending all the wrong messages. Thanks whoever-runs-Biden's-internet-PR :(

You angry? (-:

True. Those two sets of laws and enforcement are wholly inconsistent, not to mention unjust in two different directions, which is a lot worse than it being merely one way or the other.

Needs or wants? This makes a huge difference.

IMHO someone going through hunger is perfectly justified in shoplifting food and not be imprisoned for it, particularly if they sought government of charity-provided free food and found none. Not so much for someone shoplifting a mobile phone or two -- per day.

There's some of a gray area in this, but for the most part the two extremes of the line are clearly distinguishable.

Amazon can suck my balls.

Anybody who thinks this new normal is normal ain't normal in the head.

but I don't brag about it.

Dude... A website that costs nothing makes you the product. That's what they need cookies for: you-the-product aren't allowed to refuse tracking.

But more prosaically, cookies are also used by websites to tracks the state of your sessions. Cookies were literally designed for this genuine, legit purpose, and they're still used for that when they're not used to invade your privacy.

If they want to make Pluto the state's planet, and the Sun the state's official black hole, I don't really care.

What I do care about however is that my tax dollars pay for those bozos to work on idiocies like this instead of on real issues.

I did mention Patrick Stewart didn't I?

Although you never know, I might actually like the theater. Because Patrick Stewart is a superb thespian.