Many PFAS/Forever Chemicals have a structure and effect similar to estrogen, which makes men less manly. It also appears that there are environmental effects lowering testosterone, some researchers Link this to PFAS as well. Low sperm count has also been linked to PFAS.

So, yeah, they literally make your more trans. If you're a man that is.

Note to self: after the collapse, and after reestablishing the republic, let's outlaw the shit out of these companies. Markets should serve mankind, not the other way around.

Who said it has to be based on commercial cell technology? Design the radio to talk to satellites you control, like when the U.S. bugged China's equivalent of Air Force One.

They are slowly gaining in Germany too and have been for the last two decades or so, also due to some EU funding while back. Some German towns even exploited this a little by stringing roundabouts together. They make you dizzy driving through them. That aside, roundabouts are a surefire way to slow down traffic to reasonable speeds, remove breaking and waiting at traffic lights and are low-maintenance intersections.

They'd be the default intersection if I were in charge.

Sadly, quite a few of my fellow German citizens whine like crybabies about them and would rather wait at traffic-lights. I don't quite get it, but this is Germany where people are similarly crazy about cars as some are about guns and gun regulations in the US. Go figure.

Narrative podcast is a media format, not an industry. Conflating those two like some silly dimwit is very likely to lose you big amounts of money. QED.

"Serial" was a podcast that helped kicked off the craze. It was new, had the true-crime pull that fascinates women and men alike, produced with a fairly low budget, available for free download asynchronously (unlike radio shows), covered a current controversy (which it helped hype up, partly out of self interest in the attention economy) and had enough cliff-hangers to string people along and have people around the world awaiting the next episode.

There is one "problem" with this sort of format though: It takes time to consume, very much like a streaming series. And there is only so much time that shows like this can eat up. I jumped on the "Serial" bandwagon right after a close friend of mine got all hyped up about it. I listened to a few episodes but quickly noticed the cliff-hanger shtick on keeping people on edge wether the convict was guilty or not. IMHO the trick was somewhat transparent and it became less compelling after I noticed it.

I'm pretty sure the format is still out there and used by podcasts, but it never was an industry, since every regular person with a cheap-ass laptop and a free installation of reaper or ardour has everything they need to get going and producing their own narrative podcast.

Thinking that this is an "industry" in itself was quite silly from the beginning. Sort of like calling "cooking spagetti" an industry.

Looking around tells me that computer skills are becoming less relevant and closer-to-basic survival skills are becoming more important. Most computer devices are way too complex for most people and true value-add to these devices and their app-space these days is a very rare thing I would argue. It's about a non-retarded digital culture 95%+ of the time and I doubt regular Gen-Z folks are more suitable for this than any other generation besides my type of Gen-X 80ies computer kid who grew up in lockstep with the development and general adoption of microcomputers. That's the reason anyone older or younger than us is often completely out of their depth when doing anything but the simplest tasks on a smartphone or computer.

AFAICT (and some other people too) there is solid indication that key aspects of a high-culture based on digital devices and their educated use is increasingly degrading and has been in the last decade or two. And once that happens you don't need or neither afford too many people sitting at a desk and operating a computer. Wether with AI or not.

... to screw this one up eventually.

What really surprises me about Nadellas M$ is that is actually pretty decent, by M$ standards that is. VS Code is a really neat contribution to the FOSS community and to open standards, as is TypeScript. Some neat surprises on that front in the last decade, I have to admit.

The silver lining is that this is Git. Building your own Github replacement borders on the trivial, as is changing your upstream SPoT repo.

What I absolutely love about Git is that it's a protocol designed and built by someone who knew what he was doing (Linus Torwalds) resulting in the fact that migrating your upstream Git Repo away from a commercial service like Github takes something like 20 seconds, if you're having a slow day.

... the forming of life and its subsequent evolution is. Yes, you need very specific circumstances for life to form in the first place and - apparently - a quite specific sequence of evolutionary happenstances for intelligent life like us to form, but other than that what happens along the way and where it leads is pretty random. Example: We have some solid evidence that todays birds are the successors to dinosaurs because they are vertebrae with a circular system that runs counter to that of all other vertebrae. Left- and right turning circular systems of blood can co-exist because they are "meta" enough to basic life, just as we can (sort of) get along with todays hornets that only come in pocket-size (unlike some of those cambrian monsters that apparently were around at some point), _but_ when it comes to cells and bacteria we're talking the very basic fundamentals of life-forms.

And unless someone discovers some organism that has internal cell-systems "spinning the other way" and has some solid research indicating and perhaps proving that both types of lifeforms can exist and evolve without significantly endangering the other it is totally prudent for molecular biologists to tread very carefully in this field. It's an epic threat, quite similar to AI or some accidental super-virus. We only have to get this wrong once and humanity, or in this case even life itself as we know it, is done for. And we wouldn't want that to happen, do we?

Cudos to the biologist talking precautions here.

I'm not worried... humanity faces practically no risk from this existential threat with all the other ones we have on our plate at the moment. :O

... is little more than a formalized model and API description anyways, so I don't see this as too much of a big deal. Well established systems use CASE tools and code generation regularly. So much so that using AI may even be a superfluous intermediate step.

That AI is likely to take over the grunt work and bulk of coding shouldn't be news anymore to anyone paying attention.

... until war, revolution, plague, or famine kills a bunch of people. After that, things sort of reset because (1) elites are nicer in a growing economy and (2) power was effectively democratized by the catastrophe... especially when you have a bunch of young men coming back from war. The decades following WWII are a good example of this.

Moreover, we can get together and pass a law that explicitly spells out what is and is not allowed in a software license. We can structure the market to protect the moral rights of consumers. The world does not belong to businessmen and lawyers, but to all of us.

You don't mistrust the math (which can be reviewed and challenged in any case), you just want the rest of us to suffer spending all the extra time/hassle/money on prepartion.

Yep, pretty much everyone is against education. Evangelicals want religious indoctrination; business leaders want worker drones; Republicans want a dumb populace and impoverished teachers; Democrats want to smother schools with bureaucracy; Libertarians want to lower their taxes; parents either want to micromanage everything or they're completely uninvolved and just want daycare; administrators just want to not get sued; teachers just want to drink (because who wouldn't in the middle of such a circus); and students just want to get back to their phones. What we need is a wide societal appreciation for education, the willingness to pay for it, and the wisdom to not overmanage it

... 10 SAP Premium subscriptions or so.