Comment Re:People are sheep and can't help themselves (Score 1) 110
Your link - seriously?
"Tobacco giants say"? Dude, they said that smoking is actually healthy for a few decades. I'd trust my cat around buckets full of her favorite treat more than those companies.
Comment Re:fix your router, we'll trust you (Score 1) 75
Show of hands: How many people sat in on Hegseth's phone call regarding this topic?
Which call? The ones with our allies or the one with Russia?
Comment Re:People are sheep and can't help themselves (Score 1) 110
Why is that desirable?
Because the cost to society is paid not by the smokers but by all of us. And health care costs are only the tip of the iceberg.
Cull the least smart and self-restrained.
There's no culling here. Both doom scrolling and smoking kill you so slowly that evolutionary it doesn't matter.
Comment Re:Leave Meta alone or face embargoes on all trade (Score 1) 110
The endless scroll is predatory at every moment.
It even reloads when you stop for a while. Switch to a different tab, do something else for five minutes, come back - it reloads and refreshes everything. Why? Because that activates a primal fear in your brain that you're losing something, missing something that might've been important, so your instinct is to NOT divert your attention elsewhere.
Comment Re:People are sheep and can't help themselves (Score 1) 110
In theory I would agree, but the issue here is that social media platforms intentionally compromise your ability to make decisions. That's what the addictive pattern is all about. You could at any moment decide to stop scrolling and get back to work or life - but everything in there is designed so that the decision is made for you and bypasses any critical thinking paths in your brain.
And while I'm the first to agree the politicians are sleazebags and are the first ones that need much tougher regulation and laws, it's a fact that laws in this area actually do work. Anti-smoking laws have reduced smoking, for example.
Comment Re:so... (Score 1) 176
All of that is still available for you, all you need to do is stop clicking the cheapest price you see every time you fly.
Someone hasn't flown in a while.
I don't click the cheapest price. What happened is that the major airlines have copied some (not all) of the budget airline shit. Luggage used to be included, now it's an extra - which causes people to bring carry-on to the max instead, which leads to the overhead compartments always being full.
You're being offered a nice delicatessen along side a shit sandwich and *YOU* are choosing the shit sandwich and complaining about the taste.
Yeah, good point. No, wait, that's complete bullshit.
I've taken a number of trips on business class in the past years. What you get in business class today is what you got in economy class 20, 25 years ago.
Either way you're getting an order of magnitude better flying experience for the same price as the days of old.
You know what, you may actually be right if you compare multi-thousand halfway-around-the-world intercontinental flights. I've never flown to Australia, so I can't compare that. I'm talking about shorter flights (a few hours) which I do frequently and where I can compare. We might both be right.
Comment Re:Anyone Here? (Score 2) 31
Comment so... (Score 2) 176
gaining access to a luxurious airport experience
So... ordinary airport before enshitification ?
Air travel used to be pretty cool. Now absolutely every part of it is annoying. Especially the booking and its 25 upsale offers.
A few years more of this and you'll have to book business just to get a seat and fresh air.
Comment Re:Will the AI-fueled SSD-crisis be over in 2028? (Score 1) 79
Comment Re:Sounds like BS to me (Score 2) 37
The Alpha-Radiation from Plutonium is already undetectable on the other side of a piece of paper. And, incidentally, Plutonium based nuclear weapons are lighter than Uranium based ones. Such a coincidence. Sounds to me like this person is full of crap.
This is one of those cases where things are not as simple as they seem. For one, plutonium does not directly decay to stable lead. You will never have a pure plutonium core for very long, so daughters are going to be present, some of which decay via gamma emission, and we know the ratios they will show up in over time. For another, when plutonium decays, the resulting daughter doesn't always end up in a ground state right away, but lands at an excited state, which then drops to ground, emitting a gamma when it does. Finally, the electron reconfiguration that happens during the decay gives off x-rays at known energies. All of this is why most Pu and U (also usually a alpha emitter) isotopes can be detected with a gamma spectrometer. Pu-242 is a standout, its gamma emissions are exceptionally weak, but it's undesirable in nuclear weapons which aim for as much Pu-239 as possible.
But all that is irrelevant anyway. If you read the article they are not looking for decay emissions. They are looking for neutrons created when high-energy protons from Van Allen belts slam into the uranium in the bomb. This creates a cascade of neutrons which the detection satellite's neutron scintillator based detectors (which are designed to discern the neutrons from the bomb from the background radiation) can pick up.
But sure, the nuclear physicist from MIT is the one full of crap here.
Comment Re:Lithography (Score 1) 28
Probably.
But the mirrors, for example, are made by Zeiss. Lots of parts are from the supply chain and ASML doesn't even HAVE their secrets.
You are right that some industrial espionage could be useful. I just say it's not as useful as most people would assume (which is basically the Hollywood plot of "steal this secret and we can copy it"). Nah. You can find on the Internet how a nuclear bomb is made. But it takes a lot more than a print-out to actually make one, and a couple of those steps are genuinely hard.
Comment Re:AI Company says their AI is the bestest boy (Score 1) 187
Fascinating answer.
It seems to me that the unablated thoughts fall into the category of "what would a human user expect that a good answer to this prompt would be?" - and out comes something that is clearly an aggregate of stream-of-consciousness writing.
But then the ablated models seem to go for a direct answer without much less interpretation and "pretend to be human". I wonder what that's about. I'd love the AI to answer more like the machine it is, and right now I'm getting that through skills.
Comment Re:Lithography (Score 1) 28
Not sure how far industrial espionage gets you here.
There's nothing fundamentally secret in lithography. We know how it works. The secret sauce is the experience, processes, know-how, highly specialised suppliers etc. The practical complexities are immense. Given the security incidents ASML already had, I'd make a bet that a large amount of the valuable data is already in China. But the supply chain and the engineering don't live on paper and are not easily duplicated.
Comment Facebook is the new MS (Score 1) 47
... as in: If you get in bed with them, you'll get screwed.
You really have to be a special kind of dumb to buy anything from Facebook. What did you expect? Their entire business model is selling YOU.