Yup. It's pretty hard to do the right thing when the oil cartel that has invaded Alberta keeps threatening to shit itself and is actively trying to engineer a separatist movement entirely for its own benefit. Here's hoping Carney eventually finds a way to disembowel them.

The last game Sweeney did the artwork for was ZZT. As much as I love playing around with AI art generation for fun, he's really not an expert on this.

I suspect that it's more symptom than cause, and probably not at the top of the list of causes; but I cannot overstate how much I loathe the hyperbolic use of the term 'unthinkable' in these sorts of situations. Both because it's false; and because it often acquires a sort of implicitly exculpatory implication that is entirely undeserved.

Not only is it 'thinkable'; having something awful happen when you perform a procedure that requires longterm hardcore immunosuppression and then let them follow through the cracks is trivially predictable. It's the expected behavior. Successfully reconnecting a whole ton of little blood vessels and nerves is fairly exotic medicine; predicting that thing will go poorly without substantial follow-up is trivial even by washout premed standards.

This isn't to say that it isn't ghastly, or that I could imagine being in that position; but 'unthinkable' is closer to being a claim of unpredictability or unknowability; which is wholly unwarranted. None of this was unthinkable; but nobody really cared to check or wanted to know all that much.

Especially when basically all methods of sabotaging cables(except possibly very near shore) are 'remote'/disposable; if only at the tech level of 'put anchor on rope because water deep'. Nobody is going to give a damn about losing an inert metal chunk.

Reportedly, none of that is public, the business of tapping a fiber line underwater is considerably more fiddly, and enough mines might make that a hassle; but it would also make install and repair far more expensive and probably just theatre when you consider the risk that someone at the telco isn't updating their ASAs.

I think the parent commenter was proposing an analogy to the various temples-overtaken-by-jungle and cathedrals-and-hovels societies; where the competing c-suites of the magnificent seven and aspirants suck our society dry to propitiate the promised machine god.

I have to say; datacenters will not make for terribly impressive ruins compared to historical theological white elephant projects. Truly, the future archeologists will say, this culture placed great value in cost engineered sheds for the shed god.

At least for new builds/major conversions; it's often a matter of incentives.

There's certainly some room for shenanigans with power prices; but unless it's an outright subsidy in-kind you normally end up paying something resembling the price an industrial customer would. Water prices, though, vary wildly from basically-free/plunder-the-aquifer-and-keep-what-you-find stuff that was probably a bad idea even when they were farming there a century or two ago; to something that might at least resemble a commercial or residential water bill.

If the purpose is cooling you can (fairly) neatly trade off between paying for it in power and paying for it in water; and when the price differs enormously people usually choose accordingly if they can get away with it. In the really smarmy cases they'll even run one of the power-focused datacenter efficiency metrics and pat themselves on the back for their bleeding edge 'power usage effectiveness'(just don't ask about 'water usage effectiveness').

You can run everything closed loop; either dumping to air or to some large or sufficiently fast moving body of water if available; but the electrical costs will be higher; so you typically have to force people to do that; whether by fiat or by ensuring that the price of water is suitable.

We know it weakly interacts electromagnetically, which means one of the ways in which it is posited planets form, initially via electrostatic attraction of dust particles, isn't likely to work. This means dark matter will be less "clumpy" and more diffuse, and less likely to create denser conglomerations that could lead to stellar and planetary formation.

What this finding does suggest, if it holds true, is that some form of supersymmetry, as an extension fo the Standard Model is true. Experiments over the last 10-15 years have heavily constrained the masses and energy levels of any supersymmetry model, so it would appear that if this is the case, it's going to require returning to a model that some physicists had started to abandon.

Without knowing precisely how Explorer is structured, it's conceivable that there may be different dynamically-linked libraries and/or execution points for running the desktop and for the file explorer, in which case just having explorer.exe running in and of itself doesn't mean that new modules have to be loaded if explorer.exe process fires up. The solution could very well be to load the libraries involved in file browsing when the desktop opens.

Just guessing here. There was a time when there was a lot more horsepower required for GUI elements than folder browsing, but this is 2025, and explorer.exe probably uses orders of a magnitude more resources now than it did in 1995, because... well, who knows really. Probably to sell more ads and load up more data to their AI.

That, on modern hardware, they have to preload a fucking file browser so that it pops up faster is just an indication of what a steaming pile of garbage MS is. They had sweet spots with Win2k-WinXP and with Win7, but their incoherent need to be a whole bunch of contradictory things --- with AI! has led what was a rather iffy OS and UI experience to begin with to become a cluster fuck of incoherence.

I do most of my day to day work on MacOS and Gnome, and fortunately the Terminal services version I have to RDP into is Server 2016, but every time I have to work with Windows 11 I'm just stunned by just how awful it looks and how badly it behaves.

The capacity of the government of a large jurisdiction like California, or more particularly the US, could bankrupt someone like Musk, so I say, bring it on. Within a decade Musk would have abandoned all efforts, or, even better, be stone cold broke (frankly billionaires shouldn't exist at all, and we should tax the living fuck out of them down to their last $200 million).

We're too afraid of these modern day Bond villains when we should be aiming every financial, and probably every real, cannon straight at them and putting them in a sense of mortal danger every minute of their waking lives, so that they literally piss themselves in terror at the though that "we the people" might decide to wipe them out for good.

Even if the prediction of comparatively controlled impact is accurate; I think it's worth considering just how grim it is likely to be; not in purely economic terms; but in the character of the work.

Maybe this is a personal peculiarity; but I that there's something exquisitely dispiriting about beating your head against people who are stubborn or clueless enough that every conversation is just a baffling sequence of different confusions, some of the repeated from previously. It's a totally different thing from dealing with someone who is merely ignorant; but learning, especially if they are enthusiastic about it.

Even if everything is fine in terms of job pace and security and all; that seems like it is shaping up to be a really hellish aspect of dealing with bots. The experience is sort of a somewhat weirder simulation of dealing with a chirpy, people-pleasing, very-junior type; except they are far more likely to lie than to admit ignorance; and they never learn(possibly the SaaS guys hoovering up your interactions in the background will make the next iteration better, possibly not, progress seems to have slowed considerably after only a brief period of improvement; but a given release is more or less full groundhog day).

That seems like a nightmare. Everything that sucks about teaching or mentoring; but precisely none of the rewarding aspects.

It's adorable how they pretend that the 'well being' gap between the people who matter and the ones who don't is some sort of surprise that calls for urgent action; rather than a deliberate outcome carefully achieved.

It's the pandemic-period numbers that are the anomaly, from a period when at times downright existential issues forced people's hands(at least for white collar workers; if you are 'essential' good luck and back to dealing with the public in person); and a lot of work has been put into rectifying that period.

What's next; a comparative analysis of the labor markets of the 1950s and the 1980s that studiously pretends that it's not exactly as Milton Friedman and Neutron Jack intended?

In a sense his puzzlement is justified; when the tech demo works an LLM is probably the most obvious candidate for 'just this side of sci-fi'; and, while may of the capabilities offered are actually somewhat hollow (realistically, most of the 'take these 3 bullet points and create a document that looks like I cared/take that document that looks like my colleague cared and give me 3 bullet points' are really just enticements to even more dysfunctional communication) some of them are fairly hard to see duplicating by conventional means.

However, I suspect that his perspective is fundamentally unhelpful in understanding the skepticism: when you are building stuff it's easy to get caught up in the cool novelty and lose sight of both the pain points(especially when you are deep C-Level; rather than the actual engineer fighting chatGPT's tendency to em-dash despite all attempts to control it); and overestimate how well your new-hotness stacks up against both existing alternatives and how forgiving people will or won't be about its deficiencies.

Something like Windows trying to 'conversational'/'agentic' OS settings, for instance, probably looks pretty cool if you are an optimism focused ML dude: "hey, it's not perfect but it's a natural language interface to adjusting settings that confuse users!"; but it looks like absolute garbage from an outside perspective both because it's badly unreliable; and humans tend not to respond well to clearly unreliable 'people'(if it can't even find dark mode; why waste my time with it?); and because it looks a lot like abdication of a technically simpler, less exciting, job in favor of chasing the new hotness.

"Settings are impenetrable to a nontechnical user" is a UI/UX problem(along with a certain amount of lower level 'maybe if bluetooth was less fucked people wouldn't care where the settings were because it would just work); so throwing an LLM at the problem is basically throwing up your hands and calling it unsolvable by your UI/UX people; which is the an abject concession of failure; not a mark of progress.

I think it may be that that he really isn't understanding: MS has spent years squandering the perception that they would at least try to provide an OS that allowed you to do your stuff; in favor of faffing with various attempts to be your cool app buddy and relentless upsell pal; so every further move in that direction is basically confirmation that no fucks are given about just trying to keep the fundamentals in good order rather than getting distracted by shiny things.

I suspect that a more fundamental problem is what you would need to preserve.

Embryos are clearly the easier case, being small and impressively good at using some sort of contextual cue system to elaborate an entire body plan from a little cell glob(including more or less graceful handling of cases like identical twins, where physical separation of the cell blob changes requirements dramatically and abruptly); but they are also the case that faces looser constraints. If an embryo manages to grow a brain that falls within expectations for humans it's mission successful. People may have preferences; but a fairly wide range of outcomes counts as normal. If you discard or damage too much the embryo simply won't work anymore; or you'll get ghastly malformations; but there are uncounted billions of hypothetical babies that would count as 'correct' results if you perturb the embryo just slightly.

If you are freezing an adult; you presumably want more. You want the rebuilt result to fall within the realm of being them. That appears to not require an exact copy(people have at least limited ability to handle cell death and replacement or knock a few synapses around without radical personality change most of the time; and a certain amount of forgetting is considered normal); but it is going to require some amount of fidelity that quite possibly wont' be available(depending on what killed them and how, and how quickly and successfully you froze them); and which cannot, in principle, be reconstructed if lost.

Essentially the (much harder because it's all fiddly biotech) equivalent of getting someone to go out and paint a landscape for you vs. getting someone to paint the picture that was damaged when your house burned down. The first task isn't trivial; but it's without theoretical issues and getting someone who can do it to do it is easy enough. The second isn't possible, full stop, in principle, even if you are building the thing atom by atom the information regarding what you want has been partially lost; though it is, potentially, something you could more or less convincingly/inoffensively fake; the way people do photoshop 'restoration' of damaged photos where the result is a lie; but a plausible one that looks better than the damage does.

The fraught ethics of neurally engineering someone until your client says that their personality, memories, and behavior 'seem right' is, of course, left as an exercise to the reader; along with the requisite neuropsychology.

Is this the same Klarna that has already been through one cycle of being super bullish about AI and then having to re-hire some actual customer support?