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.

woke, adj. - "Not a knee-jerk reactionary like me."

Heheh. I finally, two weeks ago, upgraded my parents' printer -- about 20 years ago I had given them an HP Laserjet 4000TN that I had gotten for free from work (because 20 years ago they were already wildly out of date). The 4000TN's worked reasonably well for them all this time, but finally was having some performance issues (some jams, but also problems with bigger docs) and they were tired of having two devices -- the 4000TN for printing B&W, and their canon inkjet that had stopped printing a long time ago they were only using for scanning -- so we upgraded to a Brother color laser MFC. I did literally throw away the 4000TN, but this -- probably close to 30 years old -- printer was still basically working.

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.

> 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.

Anything that goes slow enough to be captured into an orbit will eventually spiral inwards.

Well, most of it (when we're talking matter not already in another black hole). Ordinary stuff orbiting near a black hole gets torn apart by the enormous tides and forms a disk-like structure similar to a gas giant's rings. Interactions among it and with the black hole's magnetic and gravitic fields can eject a bit of it in a pair of jets out along the axis of the disk, powered apparently by the rest of the stuff falling in.

These two black holes wouldn't stick to each other, but start swirling around each other and eventually merge together.

This is partly because of friction with and among other stuff in orbit around the black holes in their "accretion disks". (Black holes experience friction by eating the stuff in the other hole's disk of debris, with the momentum of the black-hole-plus-dinner thus being different from the black-hole-before-dinner.)

It's also partly because the rapid acceleration of things passing near a black hole or orbiting it causes the emission of gravity waves to be strong enough that it carries off substantial energy. (In less extreme environments, like suns and planets, the waves are not detectable by current instruments. In the case of two black holes,orbiting each other, they're detectable from across pretty much the whole universe.) This loss of energy amounts to "friction" that eventually causes co-orbiting pairs of black holes to spiral in and combine.

My thought experiment is, what if two black holes were approaching each other very rapidly on a not-quite-collision course, so that the sides of their event horizons briefly overlapped as they passed. Would they stick together?

ISTM that if anything was inside the overlapping area they'd have to stick, since otherwise that thing would be escaping from one of them. But is there anything there? Maybe something that just now fell in and hasn't had time to fall to the center? Or, is there quantum foam inside a black hole, and if so, would that count as "something" that would force the black holes to stick?

I was hoping to learn more about the physics of sex.

By something that's not alive, I suppose?

Ah, thanks. I didn't know you could borrow shares.