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.

We can’t even detect our own signals beyond a handful of light years, even the nearest star system is questionable. But let’s say it’s 100 light years, even then that’s one ten millionth of our own galaxy, and 0% of the universe. So the idea we can even tell if anything is out there beyond thousands of star systems put into obviously artificial arrangements or entire galaxies rearranged wholesale is nonsense.

More importantly, just look at what our signals have been doing, initially they were quite omnidirectional and high power as receiver technology barely existed. As time progressed, we focused on efficiency as energy in the universe is limited and for any amount you can do more if your efficiency can be higher. Hence our radio signals now are much more directional and lower power. But if this trend continues, we may not ever be able to detect advanced signaling from more than the same bubble we have now as improvements in efficiency keep up with or outpace detection technology.

Furthet, the same principle of efficiency that makes evolved life forms here almost god like in their abilities means the entire idea aliens would use the output power of a large star to just broadcast so primitives could hear is insane and counter productive to basic reasoning. Same with creating a Dyson swarm to harness the power of its star, it would be nearly identical to a star simply hidden by dust. Plus if faster than light communication exists, in some reference frame of instant communication, then moving stars or galaxies around is an enormous waste of energy that would never happen. If faster than light communications is not possible, advanced life would likely act on a pace even faster than our fast paced societies and there can be no cohesive society, no coalition because the time delays are ultimately isolating making life invest into only a few systems or at the least, spread extremely slowly. Like our bodies that now use massive amounts of resources simply on processing and thinking as opposed to our single cellular predecessors, and like our technology that has moved from nearly 0% information processing to a significant percentage, any sufficiently advanced civilization is likely spending the majority of its energy budget on efficient information processing tasks and the entire concept of needing to burn unthinkable amounts of a precious resource on mundane brute force tasks with no benefit is unfounded.

So the complaint they left off information vital to basic understanding is not only valid, but you agree and your statement that I said it’s *more* important is made up and just a troll. Got it.

One second of storage vs two days at 100MW are such different things it makes no sense to leave out such an important detail.

So what’s among the most important things about a battery? Sure, the power it can put out, but what about the energy it can store? I swear these damn articles are just as bad as battery datasheets with partial broken information like it’s a trade secret instead of required for basic understanding of how it functions. “2000 MW” may be capacity in the sense of grid capacity, but battery capacity is generally thought of in total energy stored like MWh, of which this project has the feeling of about 2,700 MWh. It would be nice to actually include how big it actually is instead of up to so many homes for an hour or Olympic swimming pools it can heat.

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.

You won’t know until you actually use the service. Remember, this is quantum computing. /s

But I was promised a Beowulf cluster by Christmas..

More than just this, it’s also proper education and training in how to be responsible, healthy, and safe online. Simply denying them access based on nothing but authoritarian principle is likely going to lead to nonstop binges once they inevitably are on their own. It’s important for them to actually understand why.

> 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.