This ain't the early Cold War anymore. While there are certainly some super-secret weapons platforms out there, a lot of military capability is deliberately communicated and even put on display because it deters conflict.

When the Soviet Union fell the Pentagon's priorities shifted from "World War 3 against the USSR" to "wars against countries with marginally effective air forces." So when the B-2 came online, it served the Pentagon's mission better to show it off. "Look at our invisible bomber. You really think crossing us is a good idea? Be a shame of bombs just fell out of an empty sky on you without any warning whatsoever."

China wants the US to know that it can launch stealth aircraft off of its carriers because that allows it to use its carriers to assert control of the Eastern Pacific. China doesn't regard war with the United States as inevitable. Consequently, it's interested in convincing the United States that a war in the Pacific isn't worth fighting. That means eroding American confidence in American strategic and technological dominance so Americans know that a conflict with China will be costly.

This is targeted directly at American isolationists: "do you really want your kid to die for Taiwan?"

As a historian the only caveat I'd advise there is that we are unlikely to see a long, drawn-out slog like WW2 again. Production capacity is great but the next Great Power war isn't likely to take place over years or even months. So China's technological edge is likely to matter but it's tempered with a willingness to stockpile and maintain systems which may never see use.

Doing that at limited production scale is one thing. Doing it at massive, "we're going to fight a serious war with this stuff" scales is another. China, like many authoritarian regimes, has shown itself to be dazzled by the propaganda value of wonder weapons. The CJ-1000, most recently, seems like a very impressive missile system but if it doesn't exist is sufficient quantity to turn the tide against American assets in theater it's just a waste of money.

Of course, China is also famously closed lipped so it's hard to tell. It might turn out that they have tens of thousands of those things. Probably not, but maybe.

Large houses in hot climates don't have enough roof space to accommodate the number of panels you would need to displace grid power. Using obsolete panels that generated less power when they were new is only going to make the problem worse.

Leaning into unreliable power sources when demand is increasing is just going to make any supply issues worse.

Someone posted what they pay for electricity in California and what their buy back rate is and their rates are insane.

It's mostly WINE though isn't it? Well, Proton but still. That has the 64bit-32bit thunking layer required. Native Linux builds would need to be 64 bit true, but that's where I was going with the "10-20%" bit.

I run 32bit Windows games on ARM via Rosetta/MacPortingToolkit. So long as the game itself is tricked into believing it's in a 32bit universe, it's happy.

gah - Kinoite. Spelling.

That's chicken and egg though. I use Bazzite, Fedora Kinorate with some gaming tweaks. Fedora wanted to drop 32 bit and there was a lot of noise as things like Bazzite or any gaming usage at all from that distro would break.

But, if Steam went 64 bit then that's 80%-90% of the issue solved straight away, and the last 10-20% would quickly sort themselves out in response. Summary is the distros have already indicated they don't want to do the work, and it's userland that's holding them back right now. Would be mutual benefit to lose them, but userland has to move first.

Everyone online knows that. The vast majority of the population doesn't - it's not general knowledge outside of people that spend a lot of time online. That where you get this 'the famed hacker 4Chan' or 'CEO of Bitcoin' nonsense in reports, it's simply not their world and they don't swim in these waters.

I mean, I've been online since about 1989 and even I don't know that much about actual 4chan, to me it was always the Lion King's "You must never go there" scene (and then came 8chan - my god).

It doesn't surprise me that those who aren't immersed in this environment daily don't actually know that much about it.

This one in fact, saying that survey response rates for official UK data had collapsed from 35% to 5%.

Survey fatigue is one, but I think people are also more wary about having their opinions attached to data these days. At least for formal, official data anyway, obviously social media is still going strong. I think a factor is that people aren't sure how it's going to be used and if it could come back to them in some way.

Lean on your keyboard for long enough and you'll have a valid Perl program. You won't know what it does of course, but then how does that differ from any other Perl program?

Because for music, we're in a post-scarcity future. The world is not short of new music, and the tools for producing it get better and better and better. There's no shortage of people wanting to write, you can reasonably easily self-publish (and on a completely unrelated note...check out my two albums and my singles...)...there's no scarcity here.

The problem isn't availability. The problem is gaining an audience.

I thought the risk is more like some superpower version of a prion disease. If the opposite chirality organisms produced something induced opposite chirality molecules that caused our molecules to assemble in some nasty/useless way. Or perhaps an opposite amino acid is similar enough to get wedged into a regular protein but enough to throw a wrench in the works.

I think the point is that there are many facets to the problem and we just don't know, and the possible consequences are great enough that researchers should proceed with caution.

"Hey, the first one's free, kid."
"Just say 'No'!"

A fair chuck of the crypto space is "pie in the sky bullshit" with a few rare exceptions where the coin itself has been established as a critical consumable for some other service which delivers real value. But the rest? Memecoins are basically a casino with the added twist of being able to bluff other idiots into doubling down on your bet to your own benefit.

Trump Coin, on the other hand, is not a meme coin. It looks like a meme coin and you're supposed to think of it as a meme coin but it's the first kind: a coin which enables some other service that delivers real value. That value is bribing government officials.

Large purchases of Trump Coin necessarily drive the price of the coin up, allowing Trump or his chosen acolytes to sell their horded coins at a tidy profit. Everyone who holds the coins has a commonly held interest. Everyone who buys them to inflate the price and enrich the holders expects to get something for their trouble and then becomes part of the cabal of holders.

Trump Coin is basically an anti-dollar: it is backed, not by the full faith and credit of the United States but by the political corruption and dominance of the MAGA movement.