Non-compete can be agreed upon mutually by both parties at the time of an employee's departure.

Who the hell would sign one of them?

Yeh actually I really dont need an answer. People do, for some MYSTIFYING reason.

Folks, if your entitled to a payout as part of leaving a place, dont sign shit, they cant deny you that payout. ESPECIALLY if your retrenched.

I'm not *too* worried about the cancer thing. By huge margin, the majority of gene errors either do nothing or worst case kill the cell (Cells have some fairly robust mechanisms to detect errors and suicide the cell if it detects them to protect the organism). Thats not to say its impossible, and some mechanisms are more dangerous to tamper with than others (especially around ageing. Ageing is in some respect a function of the body protecting our genes from cancers. google "hayflick limit".) but I suspect a lot of gene modifications theres a fair degree of slack as to whats safe or not.

The ones that drive me around the bend are when I'm looking for technical stuff, and I find a tutorial that looks like its human written, isnt on medium, and and isn't on something thats pre-fucked like MS help forums. I'll get quarter way through when I start noticing that something about the language is a bit .... off.... and then some absolute gibberish turns up and only after wasting 10 minutes of my life do I realise I'm just reading cGPT generated content farm gibberish.

A GP friend found a classic though the other day that had a serious article about some heart condition and mid paragraph towards the end the classic line "As a chatbot from OpenAI it would be unethical to.....". On closer inspection the entire article was apparently nonsense. But even he as a medical doctor, brain bigger than almost anyone else I knew , had been strung along for quite a few paragraphs before it literally said it was chatgpt. If he can be suckered , what hope for us mere mortals.

It's hard to write something that will blow peoples' minds when you're writing in a genre that's had decades of writers mining the same material. But we ought to beware of survivor bias; the stories we remember from the Golden Age are just the ones worth remembering. Most of the stories that got published back then were derivative and extremely crude. Today, in contrast, most stories that get published are derivative but very competently crafted. I guess that's progress of a kind but in a way it's almost depressing.

I think the most recently written mind-blowing sci-fi (or perhaps weird fiction) novel I've read was China Mieville's *The City & the City*, which tied with *The Windup Girl* in 2010 for Best Novel Hugo. I was impressed both by the originality of the story and the technical quality of the writing.

I recently read Ken Liu's translation of Liu Cixin's *The Three Body Problem*, which I enjoyed. In some ways it reminds me of an old Hal Clement story in which the author works out the consequences of some scientific idea in great detail, but the story also deals with the fallout of China's Cultural Revolution and the modern rise of public anti-science sentiment. So this is a foreign novel which doesn't fit neatly into our ideas about genres of science fiction. It's got a foot in the old-school hard science fiction camp and foot in the new wave tradition of literary experimentation and social science speculation camp.

If the bullshit hashicorp has been pulling lately towards open source projects is anything to go by, I'd say hashicorp have no problem self-enshitifying. With luck IBM will throw them in the barn with Red Hat and we might see an actual improvement in corporate behavior (red hat are no saints, but at least their lawyers are kept on a leash)

Well, it's like in Econ 101 when you studied equillibrium prices. At $3500 the number of units demanded is small, but if you dropped that to $1000 there should be more units demanded, assuming consumers are economically rational.

There is a tech adoption curve in which different groups of people play important roles in each stage of a new product's life cycle. At the stage Vision Pro is at now, you'd be focused on only about 1% of the potential market. The linked article calls these people "innovators", but that's unduly complementary; these are the people who want something because it's *new* whether or not it actually does anything useful. This is not irrational per se; they're *interested* in new shit, but it's not pragmatic, and the pragmatists are where you make real money.

Still, these scare-quotes "innovators" are important because set the stage for more practical consumers to follow. Perhaps most importantly, when you are talking about a *platform* like this people hungry for applications to run on the doorstop they just bought attract developers. And when the right app comes along the product becomes very attractive to pragmatists. This happened with the original IBM PC in 1981, which if you count the monitor cost the equivalent of around $8000 in today's money. I remember this well; they were status symbols that sat on influential managers' desks doing nothing, until people started discovering VisiCalc -- the first spreadsheet. When Lotus 1-2-3 arrives two years after the PC's debut, suddenly those doorstops became must-haves for everyone.

So it's really important for Apple to get a lot of these things into peoples' hands early on if this product is ever to become successful, because it's a *platform* for app developers, and app developers need users ready to buy to justify the cost and risk. So it's likely Apple miscalculated by pricing the device so high. And lack of units sold is going to scare of developers.

But to be fair this pricing is much harder than it sounds;. Consumers are extremely perverse when it comes to their response to price changes. I once raised the price of a product from $500 to $1500 and was astonished to find sales went dramatically up. In part you could say this is because people aren't economically rational; but I think in that case it was that human judgment is much more complex and nuanced than economic models. I think customers looked at the price tag and figured nobody could sell somethign as good as we claimed our product to be for $500. And they were right, which is why I raised the price.

Thank you for balancing the parentheses. Cosmic order has been restored.

Yeah I've noticed that. I recently have taken to asking it to write SQLAlchemy models that match json nests downloaded from APIs and it aces it every time. But I'm not sure a non coder would know to ask for it, or how to do that.

Honestly, I dont think its that much buggier than what I write. I keep my standard up by writing unit tests, but those tests will explode a few times before I get it right because if I write 500 lines of code before I hit compile, chances are I've missed a comma or botched the parameter order SOMEWHERE.

Technically speaking the crime of fraud has three elements: (1) A materially false statement; (2) an intent to deceive the recipient; (3) a reliance upon the false statement by the recipient.

So, if you want to lie to people and want to avoid being charged with fraud, it's actually quite simple. You lie by omission. You distract. You prevaricate (dance around the facts). You encourage people to jump on the bandwagon; you lead them to spurious conclusions. It's so easy to lie without making any materially false statements that anyone who does lie that way when people are going to check up on him is a fool.

Not only is this way of lying *legal*, it happens every time a lawyer makes an closing statement to a jury. It's not a problem because there's an opposing counsel who's professionally trained to spot omissions and lapses of logic and to point them out. But if a lawyer introduces a *false statement of fact* to a trial that's a very serious offense, in fact grounds for disbarrment because that can't be fixed by having an alert opponent.

We have similar standards of truthfullness for advertising and politics because in theory there's competition that's supposed to make up for your dishonesty. In practice that doesn't work very well because there is *nobody* involved (like a judge) who cares about people making sound judgments. But still, any brand that relies on materially false statements is a brand you want to avoid because they don't even measure up to the laxest imaginable standards of honesty.

Now investors have lots of money, so they receive a somehat better class of legal protections than consumers or voters do. There are expectations of dilligence and duties to disclose certain things etc. that can get someone selling investments into trouble. But that's still not as bad as committing *fraud*, which is stupid and therefore gets extra severe punishment.

If I understand your argument properly, you're suggesting that things will be OK with the reefs because "survival of the fittest" will produce a population of corals better adapted to warmer conditions.

Let me first point out is that this isn't really an argument, it's a hypothesis. In fact this is the very question that actual *reef scientists* are raising -- the ability of reefs to survive as an ecosystem under survival pressure. There's no reason to believe reefs will surivive just because fitter organisms will *tend* to reproduce more, populations perish all the time. When it's a keystone species in an ecosystem, that ecosystem collapses. There is no invisible hand here steering things to any preordained conclusion.

So arguing over terminology here is really just an attempt to distract (name calling even more so) from your weak position on whether reefs will survive or not.

However, returning to that irrelevant terminology argument, you are undoubtedly making an evolutionary argument. You may be thinking that natural selection won't produce a new taxonomic *species* for thousands of generations, and you'd be right. However it will produce a new *clade*. When a better-adapted clade emerges due to survival pressures, that is evolution by natural selection. Whether we call that new clade a "species" is purely a human convention adopted and managed to facilitate scientific communication.

You don't have to take my word for any of this. Put it to any working biologist you know.

Ok lets get a couple of things straight.

1) Climate deniers aren't "Skeptics". Science Skepticism is about applying the scientific method to scientific claim. Climate denialism is about applying political convictions to scientific claims.

2) The term your looking for isn't "Alarmist", its "Scientist".

If you sell a copyrighted work, you are infringing on the copyright holder's exclusive rights to distribution.

No. If I make an unauthorized copy, then (and only then) I am infringing regardless of whether I sell it. Copyright (literally, the right to copy) is only about copying, not distribution. It's not "distribution-right."

If I legally obtained an authorized copy or copies, I'm free to sell it/them or do anything else with it/them I want (except copy it/them or make derivative works unless I have been granted permission to do so by the copyright holder).

The answer is that this is somewhat misleading; there are plenty of Z80 compatible chips still being manufactured. The TI-84 uses the eZ80, which is four times faster and will still be around. There are also many (many) clones that are closer to cycle-exact.

Central Park is "publicly available," but that doesn't mean you have the right to cut down the trees in it and sell them for lumber. The AI companies are selling lumber and when you ask them where they got it, they shrug and say "publicly available sources."

It's confusing because of non-unique names, but I haven't been able to find a CV, bio, or publication list... nothing to confirm that he is at NASA, was at NASA, or that he's the top electrostatics expert at NASA.