Raise your hand if you have programming in machine language - entering binary directly into memory. Raise your hand if you have programmed in assembly. Raise your hand if you have programming low-level stuff in C.

The first question will have the fewest takers, because there is almost no reason to do that anymore. Assembly will have a few more takers, low-level C a few more. Technology has progressed, our compilers, optimizers and linkers have gotten better.

Historically, there have been numerous attempts to replace source code with some kind of language of specifications. They have all failed...until now. AI may finally achieve that.

Technology advances. Jobs shift. It is absolutely not comfortable for those affected. I knew a guy who started out as a typesetter (putting little metal letters into rows), then he made a huge effort to re-school and learn software for printing. Then printers mostly died out and he became...a gardener.

Regardless of what happens, we will still need some human programmers, just as there are still a few assembly language wizards.

There have been several "fireballs" over various parts of the world, just in the past couple of weeks. Some wandering asteroid came apart?

buying information on Americans without obtaining a warrant was an "outrageous end-run around the Fourth Amendment"

Exactly. If law enforcement has reason to investigate you, they can and should get a warrant. If they have no reason to investigate you, WTF are they doing, buying data about you?

It's like the continual attempts at "chat control" in Europe: Law enforcement sees themselves as the caped heroes who do not need to respect individual rights or due process. It would be so much easier if they could just keep everyone under surveillance 24/7.

Apparently, once you are in the VC crowd, you can get investors by hawking any kind of snake oil. I'm sure this guy will soon be rolling in the dough again. In a few years, his employees and investors will be left with nothing (again), but Milton will be doing just fine.

...are essentially impossible to establish. Suits for "climate change" would be nothing but a way for ambulance-chasing lawyers to enrich themselves.

Yeah, I feel the same way. Also, it's not only people wanting lies to be true. People will start manipulating real-world events. Just imaging: Someone bets on a terrorist attack in a certain place, at a certain time, and then arranges for it to happen.

Bizarre journalism. The NY Times really isn't what it used to be. Cables as "round as cantaloupes"? We assume they meant to describe the thickness. A structure as heavy as a "small humpback whale"? I have no idea how big (or small) that might be. Some actual, useful facts would be nice. Voltage? Watts? It's probably a fascinating engineering project, but someone needs to go back to journalism school.

For anyone curious, the CHPE site (the first link) does have some better info: 1250MW, 339 miles of cable.

Absolutely. If I am shopping for anything expensive, or just hard to find, I use AI to get recommendations. While I'm sure it will be enshittified, it hasn't happened yet. Trolling through retailers' sites, tracking down reviews that aren't actually paid adverts, etc, etc. - such a pain. Let a bot (or AI) do at least some of the work.

Just refuse. Modify your T&C to prohibit usage in jurisdictions that require age verification. Then enforce it. Let's see how well the US tech industry works without Linux.

It is very unlikely that we will pick up a signal sent our way.

1. The other civilization would have to deliberately send a strong, narrow signal to our star. Why would they do that? See comment below about detectability: maybe they actually would, if they could detect us, but they cannot.

2. e would have to be looking at the exact moment that they send the signal. Consider the time periods involved: our planet has existed for billions of years, and only for about 1/10000000 of that time have we had the capability to send/receive any kind of signal. What are the chances that another civilization, on a nearby star, is in exactly this window?

So what about detecting a civlization without a deliberate signal. That means that the signals are not directed - just radio noise. Our current technology is very sensitive, and yet, we would be unable to detect an equivalent civilization on the nearest star. The inverse-square law, over light years, means that signals are just too weak.

Fortunately, somehow, there are a lot of FOSS models. We need to work to keep as much of AI open-source as possible. It's a lot harder for a government to declare FOSS a supply-chain risk, or to nationalize it, because anyone can make a copy and keep going.

Honestly, that's probably not Firefox's fault. Far more likely that the site is checking your browser version and refusing to work with Firefox.

Where's the temperature increase? Using carefully sited stations, the USCRN shows very little change over the past 20 years. Shocking, what happens when you remove UHI and general siting problems from your climate measurements. Unfortunately, the USCRN was only created 20 years ago.

Other climate networks are not reliable. Looking at USHCN, for example, more than 80% of the climate stations are poorly sited (suffering from UHI, located near pavement or heat sources, etc.). Add in the incredibly sparse coverage over large regions (arctic and antarctic, much of Asia and Africa, all of the oceans), and any sort of "global surface temperature" is simply a fantasy figure.

A far better way of measuring "global temperature" is by satellite. We have satellite measurements starting in 1979. According to these, the global temperature has risen an average of 0.16C/decade. Not 0.2C and certainly not 0.35C.

Translators have been using various forms of tools, including "AI" tools for many years. The point is: as a professional translator, you treat what the tools produce as a draft, and do the final corrections yourself.

Of course, Wikimedia probably didn't hire qualified, professional translators, because that would cost actual money.

Of course, any disruption of sea life is due to global warming. It has nothing at all to do with massive commercial fishing fleets destroying fish stocks, with knock-on effects throughout the food chain.