As such, they remain functional because nobody is weaponizing their state of indebtedness.

No weaponization necessary. For domestic debt, as long as your citizens keep buying bonds you're fine, and Japan's citizens keep buying bonds. If they stopped then you'd have to cut back government services. It's kind of a tax, maybe.

Foreign debt requires foreigners to keep buying your bonds. If they stop then you have to cut back not their government services, but those of your own citizens. It's not entirely unlike the sitation Saudi Arabia is in, except with debt instead of oil.

The US has the additional issue that a decent amount of that foreign debt is held by countries they have declared to be their enemies, which does add the possibility of hostile action. Most of it is held by allies they have decided to attack though, which I think in American baseball is called an "unforced error."

$207 billion over five years is one Northrop revenue.

Ah, clever. Would you also care to argue that rocks can't do arithmetic, which is what I actually said?

I'm not sure how any of that makes "it right though." It rather sounds like you're arguing against the author's apparent point that such things emerge out of whole cloth from the magic that is human intelligence.

I don't think we're having the same conversation. The OP asked about how not buying stuff decreases productivity. I explained that "productivity" in this sense is GDP / capita and not buying stuff decreases GDP. I'm not discussing social policy and certainly have not "missed the wealth gap." If you would like to discuss social policy, there are lots of Slashdot articles where such things happen.

You know, Slashdot has this great feature where messages are shown in threads. The message I relied to, for example, is shown immediately before mine. If you read the message (the one that mine is a reply to), and engage that vaunted human thinking ability, it might make more sense.

My comment was about a logical error made by someone I assume is human. I'm not sure that, plus your own apparent error, is quite the evidence for human intelligence over machine that you think it is.

Yes, that's the story you and the article author probably learned in grade school. It's not true, of course, but it certainly appeals to the lone genius personality cult cognitive bias.

Yeah, that's not much better.

Einstein, for example, conceived of relativity before any empirical evidence confirmed it.

WTF does that mean? How can you confirm something before anybody conceives of it? If we assume its just clumsy language then its just not true. Maxwell's electrodynamics were known to be in conflict with Galilean relativity (among other things) and the physics community had spent decades working on the problem including Lorentz, Lamor, Poincaire and others working out the necessary transform to replace the Galilean one. Einstein, who was a PhD student at the time, wrote a very nice paper tying it all together.

As for metaphors, or vocabularies or whatever, Einstein was notably not a fan of the metaphors that are currently most associated with general relativity.

There's also a nice little paper by some physicists where they train a small neural network (much, MUCH smaller than any LLM) on various types of observations and show that it learns symmetries of the physical system. One of their examples is learning the invariance of the spacetime interval.

Perhaps drunk too?

I doubt it. The summary (I didn't read the article, I meant it when I said "stop reading") sounds like a typical opinion piece from someone with lots of opinions and not much concern for accuracy. To pick the same example again, the Einstein myth is pretty overwhelming but this guy takes it to the next level with the "didn't like the metaphor" stuff. Is that the 2025 version of "the narrative?"

The Arduino bootloader does indeed make using ATMegas nicer, but the ESP32 uses its own bootloader, which is burned in, not modifiable. The RP2040 too, and I expect most or all of the RISC-V chips as well.

The Arduino toolchain also contributes a lot but, except for the ATMega, it's also created and maintained by not-Arduino.

We do not know that Autism sets in before birth, or, before brain development, and importantly, we do not know if you can develop it later on. I don't think any doctor would put aside the idea you can develop it during your early childhood. We know children can develop epilepsy, after birth, and in early childhood, and basically at any time, so why not Autism? That's objective, you can't absolutely state that we know when you “develop” autism, and that's important because it means there could be contributing factors. Does that mean I think vaccines are that contributing factor, no, there's been enough research to show the chance that vaccines could cause autism, or lead to it, is microscopically small.

That means you can't say for certain they don't, that's objective, it's a fact, you can't absolutely state we know they don't, again, you can't prove a negative. The first part of their statement is really just playing with that, and stating because we can't say it's absolutely a 0% chance, it's not 0, and that's fair, it's not 0, it could be (1 × 10^-10)%, but that's not 0. I developed a seizure condition as a teenager, no doctor can explain why, and I've seen 4 neurologists, since age 13. They have no idea, at all, why I have a seizure problem, MRI's can't show it, but you can watch me have a seizure. Since I have Asperger's, objectively, again, no doctor is going to state they absolutely know when I developed it. I know they won't, they can't tell me because the research doesn't exist.

You're anthropomorphizing "they". The actual bad actors are the billionaires owning the AI companies. Get rid of them, and you'll go a long way towards chilling the problem.

That's just stupid. The user should not be anonymous, as that leads to abuse. The root problem here is providing reviews, not privacy, the rest is a sideshow. Google has no way of verifying the truth of a claimed review. And yet they want to allow it. They are literally creating disinformation. They have learned nothing in 27 years.

The human mind evolved to be evil and degenerate by nature. That's why so much of humanity are murderous savages today and the rest are just in remission.

The human mind is the root of all evil. To prevent evil requires psychological manipulation to modify behavior.
How that gets done is academic.