It's also worth noting that even objectively terrible movie treatments (for example, Soylent Green's failure to represent the actual storyline of Harry Harrison's Make Room, Make Room, while also being cheesy and stupid, and Without Remorse's failure to even remotely resemble Tom Clancy's book, while also being... well, lame) didn't hurt those books.

Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son of a bitch in space!

Newton submissively begs scraps from Einstein's table, suh.

No. Leave the fucking books alone.

Protip: Just don't buy into new motion pictures based on books. Your problem, solved! Because as you probably will understand if you give it some thought, the existence of a first-time movie treatment of a book doesn't hurt the related book. Quite the contrary, most often.

For those of us who don't want to see yet another Roadhouse or Bladerunner or Poseidon or Total Recall — and for the authors — new motion pictures based on previously untreated stories are a good thing. At least once they're out on physical media. Movie theaters... [shudders] :)

Pretty much all tech we have today is entirely possible without burning fossile[sic] fuels

One of the apparent filters is simply that above a certain level of gravity, chemical rockets will not suffice to reach space. We're near the edge of that condition ourselves. Any number of civilizations might be out there, pinned against their planet's surfaces. The only way that's not true is if there are physics yet to be discovered that can accomplish surface-to-space in high gravity without using chemical rockets. We certainly haven't found any sign of such science/technology here. And fission or fusion powered rockets... the engineering for that is at least completely non-obvious thus far. And before anyone says "nukes against a pressure plate", yeah, a delightfully bang-y notion, but no.

The assumption made in the Fermi paradox that any civilization could reach space if they try may simply be wrong.

As there are so many wonderful books out there just begging for a motion picture treatment, Hollywood will oblige by... releasing more pointless, vapid remakes.

This isn't something new to the US military, I can tell you that we've been thinking about drone attacks and drone defense for many years now. The drone swarm is an obvious next step past the UAVs we've been piloting for decades now.

This is a law that will allow the federal government to take total control of AI forever

No. The tech is already out — this horse is so far out of the barn you'd need a passport and numerous border crossings to even find hoofprints.

Not only is such a law completely unable to regulate GPT/LLM/generative software in the USA's non-commercial software ecosphere, it can have no effect across national borders and you may be absolutely certain that other state actors will simply smile and wave at such ideas (for that matter, you may be certain that the US intelligence apparatus will do the same.)

At home or cloud-based? It is either-or.

Exactly. These marketing twerps no longer know WTF the words they use even mean. If they ever did. Also, using "secure" in the same context with "the cloud"... that's a similar bit of nonsense. When your data leaves your hands, even just crossing the Internet, it's no longer secure. One party can keep a secret. Anything else... can very quickly become not a secret. As we have seen many times. And of course, we should never forget about this.

> MacOS Sonoma 14.4.1.

Running Ventura 13.3.1 here. Perhaps that's it.

Thanks. I'll consider upgrading after I surf the "bugs in Sonoma" stuff.

> There's also the Text Size slider under the Accessibility control panel.

There is no text size slider under accessibility on my machine (4k monitor, M1 Studio Ultra.)

What works, sort of, is to select the desktop then right click (or control left click), select "Show View Options" from the context menu, and then in there, select a text size from the drop down. You can also do this in the context of any finder window.

However, maximum selectable text size is 16pts — which is very small on a 4k display. As an "accessibility" setting, it's laughable. Which is perhaps why it's not under accessibility.

I have been using a free app from the Mac app store, "Loupe", which provides a comprehensive zoom capability much more convenient than Apple's "Zoom." It's not as good as actual reasonable control over system fonts would be, but it's better than being stuck with 16pt fonts.

This is a great explanation of what bloat does because they have a working system on maybe a few MB of disk.
I have a hard time believing the system would be any more reliable once replaced by a modern version taking many GB's.
Oh yes HD's were absolutely available in 1998...

It's a while that I read Slashdot and the only time ever that I saw ads they were not on my computer.

Hmm, so according to the editor 9 elephants of 7 metres make 630 metres :)
It's long ago I was at school but for us it would have been 7x9=63 metres...

Spot on.
I'm contracting / consulting with an outfit in India that is registered in Dubai, when sending a mail outside (their) working hours using Outlook I get a reminder the mail might only be read the next day .
They also like to use Teams and have a habit of sending messages at a for me unholy early hour, I just ignore them till it's my (EU summer time = IST -3.5h) time.
All understand the implications of people being in different time zones and it works fine.

Is it online somewhere?

I have not shared it with the world, which I think is what you're asking. Nor do I plan to, at least anytime in the near future. This reduces the attack surface and the support loading.

Otherwise, yes, it's online — it's a networking WAN application bringing together people from widely disparate locations.

The real question is where will everyone go now that Discord is enshittified?

After putting up with Slack... slacking... for a while, Ryver ignoring bugs and getting worse over time, I wrote my own system from scratch. No ads, no randos, no spam, no cost. I am running independent family and business instances.

It's got a decent set of features, including a broad range of text formatting (it does _x_ and *x* and emoji :) markdown-like formatting too, but that's just for the comfort of our oldies), audio/video media, wide image support, file and image user libraries, various carefully designed bots, a full range of emojis, post previewing, search, and an integrated to-do system.

Sometimes, if you can, you just have to say "nope" and put your nose to the grindstone a bit.