You can add how they've recently reclassified transgenerism (ne gender dysphoria) to the reasons why people have lost trust in the mainstream medical/psychological profession, as well.

Psychology has always been prone to un-scientific activities, but it's become increasingly bad with the wanton politicization of diagnostic standards, on top of the un-scientific approach employed in making most individual diagnosis.

LLM-based AI can do some pretty impressive things. It *seems* to answer questions with remarkable accuracy, and it instantly produces code in response to often ridiculously vague input queries:

"Write me an app to track ant farms in Vietnam"

And what do you know? You get something that seems surprisingly useful!

Except that it's all an illusion.

I'm an experienced software developer (25 years now) and I focus on information lifecycle apps targeting workgroups and enterprise - organizations of 50+ people. As I write this, about 20,000 people are concurrently using an app I created.

Over the past year or so, I've been trying to deeply integrate AI into my workflow. It's there when I write code in VSCode, it's there when I write sysadmin/shell code, and it's there when I'm refactoring.

The more I use it, and the "better" it gets, the more frustrating I find it. It's only somewhat useful in the area that most coding projects fail: debugging.

No matter what it seems, LLM-based AI doesn't *understand* anything. It's just an ever-more-clever trickery based on word prediction. As such, it serves only as another abstraction that still must be understood and reviewed by a real person with actual understanding, or the result is untrustable, unstable, and insecure "vibe code" that is largely worthless outside of securing VC funding, which is the thing that AI perhaps does best: help unprepared people get VC funding.

You still need real people to get code you can live with, depend on, and grow with.

Fantastic - exactly what I have always not wanted! Fingerprints on my screen!

WWW now stands for Woke White Women, apparently.

They've done this with every meaningful cultural and corporate heritage item in our world. It's disgusting.

You don't honor the heritage of a people by removing all symbolic representations of that culture from public life. The Spartans and Centurions were millennia ago but still have strong, important cultural imagery for today: the same is true of the Apache. The apache were known for being mobile and adaptable, which arguably is something very true of the Apache foundation.

Removing these imageries results in a symbolically empty, culturally irreverent pastiche. Who was it that said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”?

This is no different than the wanton destruction of ancient sculptures and art by ignorant tribesmen because it offends their sensibilities.

Right, that has nothing at all to do with this exception.

shakycam was an abomination, a hallmark of a lack of artistic skill, in cinematographically filmmaking. I hate The Gladiator for introducing it, it's made a decade+ of films almost unwatchable for anything remotely artistic.

It's amazing how many of you are responding out of emotional vitriol without even understanding import tariffs work in this case. The article rage baited you all.

This isn't going to put prices through the roof on anything but temu and similar direct-ship sites. Even most amazon-associated warehousers will be unimpacted: they were already shipping in such volumes the 'free' shipping was almost meaningless. It was an exception for - mostly - small trinkets. Raising the amount to $800 didn't matter much - items that really cost $500 were just having a declared value of much less (likely closer to the foreign purchase price).

You'll still be able to buy cheap trinkets and electronics. Amazon has competitively extinguished all but about 20% of online commerce outside their site.

More importantly... this will also impact all the illicit pharma people have figured out they could buy from eg. India at a drastically lower price than is available domestically. That's the bigger problem, as there's no other viable alternative for many people.

Though wasn't there something else crazy going on about pharma prices being globally leveled under threat of Trump? I know there was some sort of insane cutback in... Medicaid? Or Medicare? Hard to keep track of it all.

/. used to have a Monty Python rabbit icon. Wonder why that wasn't used.

You mean they're not yellow?

That's the color teeth are supposed to be.

I'm not sure if this is true, but I saw a stat recently: no civilization - and we are a global civilization at this point - has ever recovered culturally once their population replacement rate has dropped beneath 1.8.

That's sobering, regardless. We've got many developed populations rapidly approaching low 1.x ratios, while continuing to import (predominantly, young, male, illiterate) immigrants from what could best be described as "the developing world".

That's not a situation that works out well for anyone, in the end.

This has happened many times over the decades. Osmosis (mostly!) results in the better changes trickling back into mainstream linux distributions.

My least/most favorite example of this is Stormix Linux.

It was based on Debian, back in 1999. It was geared towards a simplified desktop experience and introduced a lot of new things, at the time: graphical installer that detected hardware (and had a broad set of hardware support not found elsewhere); GUI apt manager; and a number of other really clean add ons that made the desktop more usable. It was head and shoulders above all other options at the time.

When Stormix the company failed, and the distro died, the resulting community/developer effort became the Progeny Debian distribution for a short while, and a Progeny package repository. I used that for years.

Arguably, if it wasn't for Stormix, Ubuntu wouldn't have become what it is today, as those efforts were later channeled into Ubuntu.

As with most things in life, it's 2 steps forward and one step back...

That's not a purpose, aka a focus, it's a method.

Calling Belgium 3rd world isn't fair at all. It's a fledging 3rd world country at worst, nothing at all similar to the imminent 3rd world country that (say) the UK is.

You spend a lot of time on X, huh?