The problem isn't the population. Bedrock can handle more than that. London isn't sinking because of all the people (and London is huge!), it's sinking because the ice sheet that pressed the Highlands deep into the crust has been gone for the last 10,000 years, resulting in the entire island tilting back to where it naturally should be. You could move London's population into the Great Glen and it would not make the slightest difference - London would still be sinking. The ice sheets were a whole lot heavier than a few tens of millions of people.

(Ok, it would make a difference. If the rich people actually lived in Scotland, the transit system and public services would see a thousand percent improvement inside a week. If they were also forced to speak Gaelic, English would vanish in a month.)

Aquifers can be deep. The aquifer that supplies the town of Buxton in England is so deep that it takes rainfall 5,000 years to rech it.

Every place? Fascinating.

There are towns in England and Wales that have been occupied for the past 10,000 years. Manchester isn't the greatest place on Earth, but I'm really not convinced it's going to start sinking into the ground any time in the next thousand years. If "short term" is longer than the remaining lifespan of the human race, I am not convinced "short" is really the right word.

"Short term" is only meaningful if it's shorter than the time needed to take meaningful remedial action, and the time it would take to remediate the problem in Mexico City vastly exceeds the time it will take for the city to crumble into oblivion.

The sun will not explode in 4 billion years. It's far too small. It might well run out of hydrogen by then, but that will simply cause it to swell. If, in four billion years, we can't find a way to drift the Earth outwards to remain within the goldilocks zone, then we're a failure as a species. Of course, we might well have built a Dyson Ring by then. Although, to be honest, if we were going to do that, we'd want to find a gas cloud that was about to form a stellar nursary and head there. If we arrive as the proto star fires up, we've maximum resources in the easiest possible form (a dust cloud, so no mining needed and minimal processing required), can build the Dyson Ring or Dyson Sphere by the time the star really gets going, and have another ten to fifteen billion years.

Please remember the APA voted to torture and destroy the minds of people who wore Casio watches, and assisted in that torture program. (All anyone needed to be arrested under the bounty program was to be in a suspicious area or to have a highly accurate clock or watch. No actual evidence of wrongdoing was required.)

Many practitioners had absolutely no problems with abusing their knowledge and ability, not against actual terrorists or even people from the same nation as the terrorists, but against easy targets. The banality of evil, demonstrated to a high degree.

If an organisation can commit acts of utter depravity and evil on whim, then a whim is all that is needed.

This doesn't mean it will happen, but the APA has shown no obvious signs of maturity or rationality, only excuses. And that's not a good position to be in, when the head of state has licensed ICE to gun down people without cause and has promoted the wellbeing of diseases like measles over that of the citizens.

I don't believe forcible injections are likely, but I'm also not going to say that psychiatrists have been earning trust these past 26 years. Personally, I think forcible injections won't happen, but not because psychiatrists have discovered ethics. Rather, because it just isn't practical.

Psychotherapy is unusual in that regard and they have a long history of doing exactly that. Particularly in the US. A very large chunk of what is known about psychoactive drugs come from American government programs where patients were injected without consent with a range of substances. A lot of their biological warfare research in the 60s and 70s, possibly into the 80s, was also done that way, allowing patients to die slowly from a range of diseases.

Nor has this completely stopped. The Gitmo "enhanced interrogation" program of the early 2000s involved not just torture but also involuntary substance abuse.

The use of fake vaccination programs by the US military (and the unauthorised use of Red Cross markings on vehicles by the same) is a significant factor in current world paranoia.

To be honest, it is not surprising that so many are paranoid about medicine - they voted for, and actively encouraged, such abuse when it was people they resented who suffered. And with so many in the APA voting to abuse their medical training under Bush II, it's hardly surprising that there's a feeling that such things can now be used on everyone else, too.

"Security is defined as a positive integer. By having none and then removing a layer, we overflow to perfection."

That's one reason I moved to Rolemaster. It's a much more powerful system, many more stats, but more importantly, there's no sanitising.

That's easy. The Goblin King got his own 20-part TV show in Korea, whereas Gremlins has had three films.

Ask Jeeves had real potential in the AI era -- a character you could actually recognise, which could be moulded to fit the character from the books (the training material is more than adequate for a persona). Current AI chatbots used for searches have either no real personality or a very simplistic sycophant one. A detailed persona that could keep people engaged and interested without talking them into paranoia or suicide would likely have gone down well.

It isn't hard to ensure that data cannot go off-site. It would seem to me that 99% of the issue has to do with managers wanting people to use personal devices and wanting to have direct access to information when off-site. In other words, this is not a tech issue, it is an attitude problem. Fix the attitude, and the problem goes away.

Bear in mind that the Rainbow Book (at this point, an ancient relic of the past) defined ways to mark data so that it could not pass between security bounds within an OS, or pass between security bounds over networks/external devices. We have plenty of network intrusion detection systems and host intrusion detection systems. I can't remember if it was Dr Dobbs or Linux Journal who published methods on removing root from Linux, and the concept of Least Privilege has been around a very long time.

Remote users should never have direct unsecured access to any corporate network, it should be by secure certificate-based tunnel, and passwords on corporate networks should have been replaced by Class III user certificates long ago. Corporate computers should also be properly locked down.

Databases should only ever use order-preserving record-level encryption.

None of this is, of course, sufficient in itself to secure a site, but it would provide enough basic security that most of the skript kiddies out there aren't a problem.

The use of the term "gremlin" to refer to a faulty piece of technology dates at least as far back as WW2. I think banning legit terminology (and 85+ years of usage makes it legit) is unreasonable, unless ChatGPT was actually anthropomorphising defects. That... would be more of a problem.

Given that LLMs are fundamentally classifiers, it seems reasonable to think that training data included sufficient examples of the use of "gremlin" in relation to technology that the classifier got confused and created a link between technology and fictional creatures. The use of "troll" for, well, just about anyone online these days, would not have helped. However, an exclusion rule would not seem to be the correct approach here. This is a linear separation issue. To fix an issue like this correctly, you'd presumably want to strongly inject information that differentiated between tech usage of these words and regular usage.

Neural nets are classifiers. They cannot create, they can only distinguish.

Whilst you're almost certainly correct (AI would be unlikely to conquer a problem requiring any meaningful original thinking, even with help), this gives the aforementioned student an Erdos number (which is not quite as exciting as a Fields medal, but nothing to sneeze at either) and it's entirely possible that the conjecture will turn out to actually be useful in some area.

....a series of satirical reels someone has been posting about Spirit Airlines. But, in all honesty, it seems like a genuine failure due to genuinely incompetent management. This is different from some of the early attempts at budget airlines in, say, the UK, where British Airways and other major airlines committed acts of fraud in order to redirect customers.