I mean, the way things are currently going, it appears they will in fact be stopped in Ukraine.

Oh, you meant *voluntarily* stop? Nevermind then.

Carbon dioxide is a red herring here, completely insignificant compared to the other environmental costs of burning coal, let alone all the other costs of manufacturing solar panels in a country with no effective environmental regulations at all. Just China's terrible mining practices, for example, do more environmental harm in a single year, than all the carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels in the entire history of China, possibly in the entire history of the world. And then you have what they're doing to their water and air.

Are solar panels made in China still a net win for the environment? I don't know, honestly. But I do know, if you're only looking at the CO2, you aren't even a little bit serious about enviornmental impact, you're just mindlessly virtue signaling your partisan politics.

Eh. In practice, what you really need to know here is that this disease isn't realistically ever going to be an epidemic in the modern developed world, *even* if it develops a strain that is 100% resistant to all antibiotics (which thus far hasn't quite happened). The conditions for massive spreading just aren't there. It was a large problem in the medieval world, but conditions were very different then. The plague doesn't normally spread from person-to-person directly, in the manner of something like an influenza or a coronavirus. I'm not saying that can't ever happen at all, but it's far too unusual to ever result in any kind of epidemic. To have a bubonic plague epidemic, you have to have a completely out-of-control population of intermediate carriers (principally, rodents) living in close proximity to the human population, and a lot of biting insects (principally, fleas) that routinely prey on both. We're talking full-on Monty-Python-and-the-Holy-Grail levels of societal poverty here, people laying down in straw beds because that's what's available, dealing with flea bites by scratching, grain stored in burlap sacks, rats everywhere, mice everywhere, the whole nine yards. If you clean up your society and control the vermin, ipso facto, the plague is mostly contained and hardly spreads at all.

Sure, it's not completely extinct. But it doesn't need to be, because it doesn't spread that readily. You're five thousand times more likely to be killed by a drunk driver, than to be infected by the plague bacterium. (This is assuming you live in America; yes, I looked up the actual numbers.) And most people who do get infected, don't die, because it's treatable these days, because, you know, modern medicine and stuff.

Cholera, similarly, is not an epidemic threat if you have anything resembling modern sewage treatment. So you can cross that one off your panic-immediately-if-there-is-one-case list as well.

The one that would be all kinds of scary if it ever got loose in the human population again, is smallpox. That thing spreads almost as readily as influenza, and most countries haven't vaccinated for it in decades. In America, routine vaccination was stopped more than fifty years ago, so most of the population, has not been vaccinated. We do *have* quite effective vaccines for it, but in the event of an epidemic, I doubt whether we could ramp up production fast enough, to keep up with the terrifying rate at which smallpox spreads. The one notable piece of good news is, it doesn't mutate much, so once any given patient is vaccinated against smallpox, they won't need the vaccine again. Booster shots not required, thank God. If that weren't the case, we'd probably still be losing a double-digit percentage of the human population to it every generation or so.

Eh. I do really question the wisdom of including Cubans in this. Venezuelans, despite the undeniably genuine nature of their need to get out of Venezuela, are a sudden surge, a large numeric increase within the last few years, and that has significantly contributed to the disruption and the problematic nature of the current situation in America. Haitians, as a group (albeit, perhaps not every person individually), have made their own problems at home. Nicaraguans, I don't really know their situation, so I can't really comment on their inclusion. But Cubans have been trickling into America to more or less the same extent for more than half a century; they're victims of international communism that was *not* home grown in Cuba and is ultimately not really their fault at all, individually or collectively; and they are (as a group) pretty consistently good workers, reasonably innovative (not in a high-tech sense necessarily, but I mean in economic terms: they find ways to contribute positively to society); they're overall a net gain for the US economy, have been for decades; and most of them are generally law-abiding. They also have a pretty good naturalization rate, and a reasonable integration rate (meaning, they don't just keep to themselves as a closed-off isolated community; they interact with the rest of society, pretty extensively, albeit mostly within certain geographical areas). Maybe I'm missing something, but I really don't see how involving them in this whole mess is a good idea.

In that price range, there's also a significant amount of vetting, to keep out hoi polloi (and, in locations where there are a lot of celebrities, paparazzi). You're paying partly for exclusivity.

> Is there actually any benefit to the experience

Presumably these are the sorts of exclusive restaurants that cater to the wealthy and celebrities, where you need a reservation in order to get in at all. (Otherwise, they'd have no way to predict who is going to arrive, in order to research them in advance.) The benefit, presumably, would be keeping out hoi polloi and, probably more important, paparazzi.

Oh, there are also "reaction" channels with an anime character in lieu of an actual human reactor. But again, those are older and probably not what the article is talking about. (I suspect those may have got started because there were people who for one reason or another wanted to create reaction content without showing their face, which is fundamentally unworkable for obvious reasons, but that doesn't always stop people from trying things.)

I think it's talking about the AI-generated science-fiction stories that keep showing up in the sidebar (if you use the default-view mode). If they're talking about the ones I'm thinking of, the titles are typically along the lines of "We thought everything was fine, until the humans came," or some schlock like that. I've never actually *watched* one of the videos, but I don't need to; you can tell they're AI generated from the thumbnail and title. I've hit "Don't Recommend Channel" on at least a couple of dozen of them, but of course the AI slop purveyors just keep creating new channels (in much the same way that low-quality manufacturers keep creating new unpronounceable brand names to flood Amazon search results with hundreds of copies of exactly the same thing).

There are also channels where an AI voice just reads the comment section from a reddit thread, and the video is a loop of recycled junk gaming footage; but those have been around for a lot longer and so are probably not what the article is talking about. Also, until you've seen (at least the first few seconds of) a handful of the videos, it's not obvious from the thumbnail and title alone, just how lame those channels are. The new ones are much more obviously AI-generated.

Eww.

Just grab some sheet music that's too old to be under copyright, and run it through a synthesizer. You'll get an uninspired performance, but at least the composition will be good. Much better than AI-generated slop.

You're saying, I should *not* drink weed killer?

Well alright then. I'll keep that in mind, thanks.

So what you're saying is, the job LLMs are really best suited for is acting.

Or generating scripts for a children's program called "Let's Play Make Believe".

Sorry, but no.

I mean, on the one hand, sure, eventually _something_ else will displace the US dollar as the world's leading reserve currency, because that's how history works: nothing stays in a dominant position forever.

But the statement you added "yet" to was much more specific. And no, Communist China's ridiculous "dedollarization" propaganda campaign is not going to have any measurable impact on the dollar's dominance, any time soon. Among other things, the RMB has never been anywhere near stable enough to make it into the top five currencies, and as things stand now, it looks to only be getting worse. It's relatively heavily traded, but it's not stable, at all. (Contrast with, say, the Canadian dollar, which is stable enough but nowhere near heavily-traded enough.)

The further into the future you try to look, the more difficult it is to see clearly, but if I had to predict based on what we know now, I'd say the currently-existing currency that is most likely to eventually unseat the US dollar would probably end up being the Euro; the Pound Sterling and the Japanese Yen are potentially also in the running. History is seldom predictable, and it'll probably end up being something we cannot forsee right now; but even something like the Brazilian Real, has a much better shot than the RMB, which will never be stable with the CCP in power, and probably cannot survive the CCP's collapse.

As for gold, that's not new, at all; we know what its role is, and that isn't changing. People have always turned to precious metals as a reliable store of value whenever financial times are tough. And that generally works except when new technology messes things up (e.g., what happened to the price of aluminum when people figured out how to do high-temperature electrolysis). For gold, the most likely new technology to mess it up would be if somebody managed to devise an energy-efficient way to extract the dissolved gold from sea water; but even then, gold would still be a precious metal, just not quite *as* precious as it is now. (The total amount of gold in the oceans, is only a few times the quantity of gold in circulation, and less than the amount of silver in circulation.) Short of affordable transmutation (which would be *much* more disruptive than just lowering the price of gold), I can't think of any other way to turn gold into a base metal like aluminum.

Honestly, I can't think of a single use case for bluetooth on a desktop computer, that isn't better served by some other set of physical-layer and data-link-layer standards.

For a cellphone, yes, it makes sense to have e.g. a bluetooth headset.

On a desktop computer? Are you kidding? I don't even. *Maybe* on a laptop, but even that is a bit of a reach.

With that said, Windows 11 is undeniably a terrible OS option for a desktop or laptop, either one. Its main use is to make a modern multicore 64-bit system with gigabytes of RAM, perform like a Pentium-era single-core system with RAM measured in megabytes, spending most of its time ignoring user input while it swaps memory pages in and out. In case that is an era of history that you wanted to revisit, for some reason. Nostalgia for the Good Old Days, perhaps. Enjoy.

I'll be over here using a system with a virtual memory subsystem that actually works, and an update subsystem that doesn't try to store half the internet in virtual memory every time there's an update. Because I like being able to actually *use* my computer. Call me crazy.

Honestly, I think there are probably more such users on Libera chat (the largest IRC network) than on Slashdot at this point.

I see.

It's not like the X server needs a lot of major changes, at this point. It certainly doesn't need new capabilities; it *has* all the capabilities it needs. A bit of optimization, maybe? But honestly, XFree86 ran just fine on 1990s hardware, so unless you're constructing a Russian nesting doll of multi-layered virtualization or some similarly wacky pathological case, you're not going to have user-noticeable perf problems in 2025 that are best solved by changing the X server. There are some changes I would like to see in the desktop environment that I use; but none of them would require any changes to the X server itself. Apart from any security issues that come up, most of the changes it actually needs, are related to changes in other things that it has to work with: newer video cards, newer compilers that are stricter about what they will compile, newer security systems that e.g. require the software (as well as the user) to have permission to do various things, and so on.

If he's trying to make Wayland-inspired changes to the X server to compete with Wayland, he's an idiot. *Wayland* needs changes, or better yet a complete from-the-ground-up rethink, to meaningfully compete with X11. Changing the X server to do what Wayland does to compete with Wayland, would be actively counterproductive.