Interesting link/video. Thank you.

I'm an EE, and visualizing things is a really important tool for my work. Circuit diagrams, circuit board layout / routing, how a board fits in an enclosure, transformer design, etc.

That's fine, and no doubt it's powerful, but it doesn't mean there aren't other ways to approach the same kinds of work. I've been doing hardware design for a bit over 50 years now, and have quite a collection of successful original projects, many quite complex. I've been writing software since the early 1970's as well, and again, lots of completed projects in that domain. For some systems, I did both the hardware design and the supporting software.

WRT schematics and other diagrams, I'm comfortable and effective on a drafting table at putting together complex ones; but, being lazy, I've also written both schematic capture and PCB layout software, including auto-routing and auto-placement. In assembler. :)

I'm a "5" — I can't visualize anything at all. But I can juggle concepts as both words and abstractions just fine, and I find it a comfortable process to realize them as concrete products.

Likely related, I really enjoy photography; it serves as visual memory for me. It's how I can "know" how my mother and father looked, old flames, places, pets, etc. I also take pictures of my hardware projects both under development and at completion. There's definitely a worthy aspect to being able to access that information. Also, some of my most complex software products have been image manipulation systems.

The bottom line is there are definitely multiple highly functional modalities to dealing with most creative tasks.

An embryo is an organism in and of itself. It is alive and it is human in a very scientific sense of the word.

It's not human until it has a functional nervous system with a brain capable of, you know, humanity. Up to that point, it's a clump of cells, not "a human." In fact, short of that level of development, it's no more "a human" than any similarly sized clump of native cells in any person's body.

Humanity does not arise because some muscles contract or a bone develops. Early stage pregnancy does not involve a human. Later on, sure. But to pretend otherwise is anything but scientific.

Likewise, arguing that an early stage pregnancy is an organism is irrelevant; so is a blade of grass. Same for life: grass is alive. These are completely inadequate — in fact, irrelevant — metrics.

Humanity is actually the thing that is reasonable to consider; and if you try to use "humanity" when describing an early stage pregnancy, you are promoting superstition. No functional brain defines that the organism is not capable of humanity. That's a fundamental scientific truth. Consequently, if you claim otherwise, you're either being disingenuous, demonstrating that you have had a completely inadequate science education — or are stupid.

A physical fact? What, exactly, is the physical evidence of people-ness that these embryos lack?

A functional nervous system incorporating a brain capable of, you know, any aspect of humanity.

You're welcome.

All criminal law is the imposition of somebody's morality

Nonsense. A great deal of law is the result of objective determination of harm reduction — the axiom that gives rise to that is that "harm is inherently bad and therefore should be avoided when possible." Not "harm is immoral." Or "harm is un-Christian" (because as we know, Christians have a rich and storied history of causing harm, which path they continue to follow to this day.)

Although I'll grant you that legislating an early stage pregnancy is in any way equivalent to a child is definitely not an objective determination of anything. Because it's bullshit, y'see.

But yes — too much of Christian superstition and Jewish superstition has failed to admit their debt to their actual roots in a myriad of preceding superstitions. Because they're too busy pretending their imaginary friend is real and nothing else matters.

FTFY

Thus the persistence of slavery in almost all societies...
 
...Christianity took a long time to get to a rejection of slavery

Christianity has done no such thing, at least in the USA. To wit (emphasis mine):

13th Amendment:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Where are the majority of Christians rejecting the 13th amendment's direct endorsement of slavery? It's okay, I'll wait. I actually like the sound of crickets.

It's also important to note how Christian morals have generally influenced what is acceptable

It's also important to note how Christianity is (a) pure superstition and (b) hardly the only source of determining and/or resolving "what is acceptable" and (c) a rich source of decidedly dubious positions and associated action:

For instance, crusades are not acceptable; blood libel is not acceptable; burning people at the stake is not acceptable; subjugation of women is not acceptable; brainwashing is not acceptable; inquisitions are not acceptable; pretending superstition trumps science is not acceptable... although, you know, we certainly can look to Christianity for promoting and performing all of these particular exercises in influencing people to think it's okay to go about them. So... yes. Christianity certainly has been influential in these matters. Point to you, Bruce66423.

The prevalence of NAT causes almost all consumer cameras to be cloud based, otherwise users have no other way to reach them.

Nonsense. Unless by "consumer cameras" you mean webcams, which are definitively not security cameras, regardless of the associated marketing drivel.

high vehicle prices

Aside from products that are perceived as absolutely required (which EVs are largely not), the higher the price, the narrower and shorter-term the market. But there's always greed and next-quarter thinking driving these decisions on the "let's make a vehicle" end of things. TL;DR: foot-shooting.

Live by the cloud, die by the cloud.

Some pro advice:

If you want security cameras, that requires wired cameras attached to a dedicated, securely located multichannel recorder whose incoming feeds and monitoring hardware are isolated from the Internet and solidity backed up by a hefty UPS. If you require offsite backup, do it indirectly by archiving feeds you encrypt first. For your security and the security of all the innocents who inevitably end up on camera.

For intrusion detection, use dedicated hardware and expose only the "intrusion detected" signal(s) on the Internet. Don't use video triggers. Or at least, if you feel you must use video triggers (doubtful at best), only expose the "intrusion detected" flag(s) to the Internet.

When you make video accessible over the Internet, gated or not, that's the opposite of security.

If you just want to pretend, by all means, go ahead and get "security" cameras where some third party has its invasive little fingers all over your video. I'm sure it'll be fine. /s

Among these changes is VMware ending perpetual license sales in favor of a subscription-based business model

Dead to me, then. Way to go. Fortunately, there remain other options.

According to Mozilla, these services cost $10-$17 a month.

Should you be inclined to spend your time with an ML system acting as a girl/boy/fish/alien/[*] "friend" (or really, anything else you want to use GPT/LLM ML systems for), you can do so with no cost and zero data mining by using an open system such as GPT4All.

A lot of these "oh no" stories start from the premise that pay-to-use-and-suck-your-data ML systems are the entire space. They aren't. Furthermore, the open systems, while not as advanced as the largest commercial systems, are certainly advanced enough — and they are constantly improving. The number of usable models you can plug in is quite large; some of them are okay for commercial use; some aren't. All are fine for private use.

Same goes for generative imaging ML. No need to be paying for that either; the open source community has made local, unencumbered systems readily available. Stable diffusion is one of the base engines. Here is one such application.

The ML applications I've actually tried (outside of my own, which is a different subject) which are open run on desktop machines; I'm not aware of any phone-based systems as yet, and I suspect that if they did exist they'd be pretty constrained due to the memory (and perhaps GPU) limits on such devices, but there have been some recent developments in layer-by-layer processing that might enable a decent amount of functionality on more powerful phones, and opens the door for very large models on desktop machines.

Just guessing, but I suspect most /. members have desktop machines capable of running these types of systems quite well.

There is no true pigeon.

sounds like marketing some CPU features a bit differently by throwing "AI" in there.

FWIW, all of Apple's M1, M2, and M3 based hardware already include dedicated APUs as well as GPUs and CPUs. I have no idea how these devices rate in terms of the performance measures cited in TFS, but the neural-like units are present.

I will say this, too: my M1/Ultra's performance with local LLMs and generative image ML is pretty snappy. LLMs respond immediately upon query entry and produce about a paragraph every couple seconds, and images are generated in about ten seconds. What's funny is I don't think either application is even using the APUs, just the CPUs and GPUs. I'm running GPT4All and DiffusionBee (which is a Stable Diffusion derivative.)

Legislation forbidding subscription-only applications would also be a good way to go.

If an operation wants to offer subscriptions, fine. As long as it also offers a reasonably priced, "one-time buy-and-its-yours" option.

I don't buy subscription-only software. Fortunately — at least thus far — there's nothing out there I couldn't either write or find a replacement for.

My computers last a long time. When I upgrade machines (which is usually because I'm enthralled with the newer tech, either hardware or software that depends on the newer OS, not because the older hardware has failed), I stick with the same OS, which in turn has been pretty good (though not perfect, which is probably impossible) about making sure that existing applications written to older versions of the OS continue to work.

The entire idea that application X requires continuous validation/payment or it'll quit working or worse, fail to read its data files, is anathema to me.