Oh, I neglected to add...

"Because blowing shit up in any orbit, is so self-defeating a child could see it."

You're correct. And your complaint is also with the CCP. But war is always a gamble - can you win something worth more than the costs? Or can you defeat the aggressor with acceptable costs? Look carefully at the Ukraine conflict. While it seems that Ukraine is somehow succeeding at assymetrical warfare, listen to reporters on the ground. The mainstream is publishing propaganda, nothing new there. And it may seem this is illustrating the 'future of warfare'. Or it's smoke and mirrors, and a different game is truly afoot. Starlink could be destroyed, perhaps, with a Kessler attack, kill enough birds to cause fratricide. Destroy the geostationary birds? That's more damaging and gets a different response. Kill the surveillance birds in polar orbit? A different response. The CCP would be playing the long game I think. We would play the retaliatory game, I think. The mid powers are all spectators, and they are beginning to hate that, but they can't afford to play. The US must only match capability for now. There are alternatives to on-orbit destruction. We'll develop those.

Oh, so you mean. 'China deployed a weapon in space and *used* it'?

Then again, after a Kessler event, first the lost resources need to be replaced, even marginally, so that life is not too unbearable /s. Then the debris cleanup must begin. It will have to be done.

Then whoever gets up there first will mostly win. And I would put good money on knowing who gets up there first, unless the NWO offs them and destroys their industrial advantage.

And I want MY nation to be the winner. Obviously. Your wishing me and my nation ill is only 'me win' in disguise.

local LLMs aren't there yet and probably won't for the forseable future for ordinary people. If you want to run a full model like DeepSeek v4.1 Flash, you need something like half a TB of RAM.

The open-source LLMs are a different threat: They enable a service industry independent of the large players. I could today get some venture capital, rent a few racks in a hosting center, install a bunch of beefy machines and offer the same service as Claude or ChatGPT, just on an open-source model. The differences in benchmarks are becoming irrelevant for 95% of common use cases. And if I can offer that service for $19/m while OpenAI wants $29/m then OpenAI has a problem.

And IMHO this is the chinese strategy: Undermine the US AI industry by breaking its business model.

Has everyone gone insane or are we witnessing a major PsyOps ?

Since AI isn't magical, for it to be able to "kill all humans", it would have to be able to acquire the means to do so. Which means that these already exist. It means someone is able to do it right now. And we're chill with that, but worried about AI?

No doubt a bunch of autonomous weapon systems linked into a C&C could cause considerable bloodshed. Given that most of the existing weapon systems of that kind are essentially suicide drones, it'll still be limited damage.

Human-killing virus? Still need a means of creating and delivering it.
Nuclear war? We have humans in the loop.
Drive us all insane with AI-slop TikToks? A few percent of humanity still don't use that.

So what is the actual scenario ? When someone shouts "AI will kill us all", why don't we ask them "how, exactly" ?

It'll be Turtles All the Way Down. :-)

I wonder what Great A'Tuin thinks about that.

Back in the '90s I was chatting with a skript-kliddie who actually had an AOL logon like that. He figured that none of the CS drones could type it in right to nuke his account. You should have seen his face when I said the magic words: "copy and paste."

You literally post this on every article about Firefox. Aren't you tired yet? I have replied numerous times that they are *NEVER* going to do that. And then I pointed you to using policies, which will disable updates.

Which is why I don't bother with surveys from company. If they're not going to listen to their customers, why bother doing the survey?

Having to create a policy is not the same as a simple checkbox to disable something.

One would think if customers keep complaining about something that a company would look into changing it. Such as people who complained at having to use a screen in their car to change a/c or temperature or something simple. Car manufacturers went back and put buttons and knobs in to make things easier.

Apparently Mozilla isn't interested in simple. Like so many other companies, the object is to make things as complicated, convoluted, and inconvenient as possible.

Last estimate I heard said that the contamination in Oak Ridge from the Manhattan Project and the Cold War would not be cleaned up until 2050 -- 100+ years after the end of WWII.

You think that's bad? That's nothing compared to Zone rouge in northern France and Belgium. It's been uninhabitable since about 1919, and is expected to stay that way for at least 300 years, possibly as much as 700 and not because of radioactivity. No, it's because of heavy metal contamination, unexploded ordinance and poison gas shells that didn't (yet) go off.

For all they keep doing, the one thing they can't seem to do is make a checkbox to stop being harassed about updates. Apparently there is no way to do to this. It's much too complicated for them to figure out.

Perhaps they should put out a notice asking if anyone has the skills to create the checkbox and make it work.

Considerably more difficult than you imagine. Between them, they have almost 70 command-line options or flags. Taking into account that many of those behave differently depending on the presence or absence of other flags, there's a couple hundred different code paths. Then you need to handle directories, files, sparse files, sym- and hard-links, on and across different filesystems, not to mention the various file-like things scattered around (pipes, streams, etc.)

It's not rocket science, but neither is it trivial.

We knew that. But now we have proof.

Will anything happen because of that? Nah, I don't think so. A few token gestures maybe. A friendly mail to everyone saying to write better reasons, followed up by an informal mail that tells them to ignore the previous one.

This isn't a mistake. It's intentional. The more arbitrary and uncontrolled the police can act, the more it is feared, the more it is a tool for oppression and not a part of civil society, the more likely the cops will stand on the side of the powerful when there are protests or uprisings against the increasing oppression and economic divide.

Correct. The proper response is "I don't answer questions". And if they detain you, "I don't answer questions without a lawyer present".

The proper question is why should you be required to answer such a question if it's not related to a traffic stop. Your response is riddled with assumptions that first, the officer is investigating another crime, in which case indeed they may have questions to ask. A robbery? Do they have a description of the vehicle? Does it match yours, even minimally? If not, they really don't have any evidence on which to base a further expansion of the stop. Nonetheless, if you go to trial, you're not going to be required to say yes, that was my car. Let them prove it was your car. And in this case at the stop, all of what you're describing is more or less entirely inadequate for detention. Innocent until proven guilty is part of this. If they have reasonable suspicion, of course they can expand on the stop. If they're just fishing around, where you're coming from, where you're going, no.

Consider:

Traffic stop. Officer is making 'small talk'. "Where ya goin?". Where ya comin from?".

These are generally not 'small talk'. They are fishing questions, cop asking for info that could lead to suspicion, and detention while they dig for more.

And these sorts of questions can generally be answered by, simply, "None of your business, officer".

Every subsequent question, such as "I'm just making small talk", or "Hey, no big deal", or "What's the problem, you have something to hide?" are all just follow up fishing questions. And deserve no answer.

During a traffic stop, Flock gives officers information they would normally be lawfully denied, like "Where ya coming from?". Flock sidesteps your right to constitutionally refuse such information (and in the absence of reasonably articulable suspicion or other evidence, during a traffic stop, denies the officer the right to demand such information) and as such is a blight on constitutional protections. Flock must be better controlled, or abandoned.

And officers using Flock to look up the plates of their ex, former landlord, or the random guy who gave them a dirty look at a stop light are plainly violating these individuals' rights, and must be sanctioned. And the supervision of the abuses systems similarly sanctioned. Meaningful sanctions, every incident.

The Government rarely surrenders access to information. They seek power at every opportunity. In America, only the Constitution, and adherence to law, can nominally restrict this.