It's always dangerous to comment on something you haven't seen, but I have an idea. Maybe it's a problem with the whole concept of the film? Maybe a naive childish fantasy of a hero who is very, very powerful and very, very nice just doesn't really work in the same narrative as a nihilistic adolescent fantasy of a "world destroyed by war, with bad guys stealing every female child for a breeding farm"? Maybe the best reaction to realising that "please trust power" superheroes aimed at children don't make much sense when you want grimdark fantasies is just to not use such superheroes in grimdark fantasies, instead of making the point of your film that obviously "please trust power" superheroes aimed at children don't make much sense in grimdark fantasies? Maybe that act is where it becomes clear that the film needs a different protagonist? Except they'd have to invent a new character, and that wouldn't be so marketable.

The Doctor Who story Aliens of London/World War 3 has a sort of farting woman (actually an alien in a skinsuit having problems with the size difference) who then turns up in the later story Boom Town. It's actually a really good story, a lot of fandom doesn't like the "fart jokes", but there's actually nothing strange about aliens who like fart jokes just like there are some humans who like fart jokes, indeed the childishness of these aliens is part of the point, and it's sneaking in a satire in which Andrew Marr is unwittingly made to satirise himself as he fails to pick up on a bunch of vicious, vulgar and venal criminals, hiding under the skins of politicians, generals and senior policemen, plot to start a war against a mythical enemy supposedly capable of launching their "massive weapons of destruction" in "45 seconds" (which is a reference to claims from Blair that Iraq was capable of hitting British bases in 45 minutes) underneath it all.

I generally expect the Slashdot audience to mostly have working brains, so why is "here is a thing which was in comics many decades ago. This makes it automatically interesting!" such an effective marketing ploy here? Shouldn't we be looking for new and interesting ideas generated by the world of the 2020s rather than the world of the 19-whatever-it-is?

Though it's part of a general degradation in science fiction. Take robots, for example. Originally, there were stories with robots in because people were trying to imagine the future and wondered if we'd make robots to do things, obviously something for technically-minded intelligent people to be interested in. Now there are stories with robots in because they're an expected sci-fi/fantasy thing, like magic or superheroes. We need to get back to honestly speculating what the world might look like in 100 years time. Maybe the problem is that the answers look bad.

It's not supposed to be true. It's "vice-signalling" - a way of signalling to fellow fascists that you're on the same side and signalling to non-fascists that they'd better keep quiet. However, you always get plenty of people who will believe their own propaganda.

It sounds plausible, since there are plenty of people in poor countries where that would be a large salary. It would be nice if they could be more precise about the type of average though, I would expect a significant difference between the mean and the median here.

I do have to produce code as part of my job, though as is pretty typical in the industry I spend far more time reading code than writing it. But...

• Why are you talking about AI? If LLMs are AI, then so are things I use such as optimising compilers. This does matter, accurate use of language is important for understanding things
• I'm not sure why you think I'm suddenly going to lose the ability to code without LLMs just because they exist. It's only people who use them who might lose that ability through lack of practice.
• It's perfectly possible to make LLMs without doing any of those things. I think Apertus is currently leading in this area, though I haven't looked into it properly. But even if not, I don't have any burning desire to use an LLM. I generally like to do non-repetitive things for myself, I learn more that way.
• I didn't specify any conditions about where projects have got their ideas from. Otherwise this whole internet thing having started out as a US military project might be a problem.

Have you actually checked the technical details, or are you just assuming whatever allows you to be maximally grumpy? The regulations specify equipment "used for the purpose of receiving" television, that doesn't sound like it covers equipment used for the purpose of reading some text from a news website which autoplays an unwanted live video stream because some idiots think that allowing browsers to autoplay video is a good idea.

For me to even think about trying LLMs, I really need one which:

Is not actively dishonest, so it contains no programming for flattery, confidence, automatic agreement or other pretences not explicitly requested by the user.

Does not use any datacentres forced on communities or which are otherwise doing harm to them, or whose electricity and/or water consumption are secret, or which use resources gained by underhanded means or simple theft.

Is not trained on material without the consent of the people who made that material.

Is not being offered on a "cheap now, expensive later" model.

"Be the change you wish to see in the world" and all that.

"Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried". The saying doesn't refer to capitalism.

And the reason democracy isn't very good, but is still a lot better than an absence of democracy, is capitalism. Well, sort of. A more complete picture is that we need a lot of democracy, but what we have in countries which have elections is only a little bit of democracy. It's still a lot better than having no democracy, but it's not remotely enough. We only have a little bit of democracy because we have a hierarchical private property system, (capitalism, other hierarchical systems are possible but capitalism is the one we have,) and this is incompatible with democracy. Democracy, meaning not just having some elections but having the demos - ordinary people actually running things, requires equalising power amongst citizens as much as possible. But under capitalism, a small group of super-rich people get to decide what we produce, what our media says, how our technology works etc.

The fix is to change how property works. Specifically, the fundamental problem is when the owner of something is different to the user of that thing. You need to make a distinction between private property and personal property. Personal property is things which you own in order to use as part of your daily life. Personal property rights are good, to allow us as human beings to maximise our potential, safety and well-being. Private property is things you own and use that ownership to control others, most commonly to extract rent or take what they make with those things for yourself. Private property rights are bad, and no government should have the right to enforce them. It is not legitimate for for the government monopoly on force to be used to make poor people obey the rich people who own what they need in order to live. Anyone who talks about a "free country", freedom from control by others through property is needed as part of that. Both from the fundamentals of morality and liberalism, and also because creating such power through government enforcement messes up your society and prevents true democracy.

Enforcing antitrust law is still better than not enforcing it. But it's only treatment of a symptom, it doesn't treat the underlying problem.

Fortunately, this is the easiest case since you don't have to rely on any new cryptographic primitives, SLH-DSA can do it relying only on hashes. It's very slow and produces large signatures, which for many applications is a problem, but not for single important transactions such as these.

This is one of the most unknowable questions there are. There is absolutely no reason to think that they have, and there is absolutely no reason to think that they haven't. I imagine an intelligent anthill trying to work out whether any other intelligences have ever come to their island by looking for unrecognised pheromone trails.

No aliens, ever, is obviously possible, it's the simplest way of explaining why none have ever said hello or left behind stuff which has no other explanation. There are huge distances involved, it might be incredibly rare for for machine-building intelligence to evolve, and there are plenty of plausible reasons for machine-builders to not end up crossing those distances.

But it also wouldn't be remotely surprising for a few or a lot of alien things to come here without us noticing. They might be so strange we don't know what we're looking for, they might have hiding technology which is just as good as their interstellar travel technology and ethical and/or legal reasons to remain hidden. Or they might have just been here a long time ago, and picked up all their litter.

Or... they may have only been around hundreds of millions of years ago, with anything left behind having long since broken down and become atoms in rocks. Humans have only been around for a tiny fraction of this planet's lifespan. There's a tendency for people to think of official representatives visiting now and doing secret deals with governments, but when someone talks about aliens having visited Earth, I imagine things like a group of scientists and thrill-seekers coming down to collect organic material samples and have fun back when mammals weren't really a thing yet.

Most democracies hold their police to a higher standard than in the US. Also, regular citizens don't have to obey them without question.

You know where all that "four humours medicine" came from? Hydraulics was a very impressive technology, so people tried to explain the human body with it. Certain idiots have recently started doing the same thing with computers and the human brain.

That's something which should have two reactions. Stop using Microsoft software AND report them to the police for extortion.

Unions are for reducing the imbalance of power between a company and its workers. They can be used for whatever objectives the workers have. In this case, it seems the workers are not disgusting human beings who can disregard the morality of whatever they do so long as it's obeying orders, and so not being involved in war crimes is an objective of theirs.

But actually, protecting your soul is a kind of protection.