Yes

Its not just the wolf -> dog, Its every animal and plant we use. Our cats, cows, sheep, pigs. Think about it, how long would a sheep or cow or pig survive in nature amongths carnivores ? They all have been bred to not run away, be calm and relaxed until we are hungry and kill and eat them. Or if we want to use other parts of their body like their wool, or milk.

Or our food, apples? cherries ? tomatoes ? corn ? All these have natural ancestors, all of them have been modified through human selection and breeding and any other means we had, now the only thing new is, we today have the technology to do these things much faster and much more precises.

outlawing genetic editing is like outlawing using a scalpel instead of leeches. And i guess the people who are against genetic editing are probably the same that are against science and evidence based medicine. And thats while they certainly would not even live without millennia of domestication of plants and animals, that gives us todays quantity of resources and also amounts of free time

It should be a felony to insert backdoors in standards. It should not be free of consequences to threaten millions of peoples privacy.

And the article is from the MIT Technology Review. So The article talking about Doudna and Charpentier happens to be associated with their competitor. And CRISPR is a multi billion dollar thing in human medicine alone today. I dont know, but id like to hear this story from a more neutral source.

I said it in the past, and i say it again, do not run critical software or hardware that is under the control of a government thats an enemy to your government. Just this week we had exploding pagers, installation of software without permission (here).
This is not directed against Kaspersky, instead if a larger conflict broke out, russian FSB would knock on Kasperskys doors not entirely dissimilar to US knocking on doors and freezing $ deposits from Russia. The banks could say "no" to this, as much as kaspersky could say "no" to it.
And yes, if a real conflict broke out between china and the US, every piece of electronic designed by the opposing side could be used in that conflict ...

The real problem is that regulation is not designed to maximize human survival. As in lowest friction, lowest cost, maximum safety. Its designed to maximize votes from some corrupted politican.

With that we have costs of around a billion $ per new medication. And that results in pharma having no choice but to sell at insane prices to recoup these costs and not go bankrupt.

Iam very much for doing science and chemistry at home and it is possible to make some medications at a very tiny fraction of the costs, _IF_ you are a chemist and have the knowledge and training. But the idea that a random joe who has no idea about what he is doing, is going to do complex organic chemistry in his kitchen successful then purify the results by recrystallization and chromatography and then test them with NMR and other methods. Is able to interpret the results, take all saftey precautions, and so on. Yeah I think i would have quite some respect for that random joe if he does all that and then takes that pill and even more if it actually works. I mean it CAN be done but please damn, if someone does this, educate yourself about chemistry first and make sure you understand the risks, there is alot that can go wrong!

This would flow better if you replaced "EU" by some other country thats known for being against free speech and other freedoms. Its a shame what the "western" world has become

In FFmpeg a few months ago people complained about sustainability
One solution suggested was a consulting company and employment. The other was donations through SPI and funding work and maintenance with that money. (these are obviously not exclusive nor conflicting)
We do have FFlabs that employs FFmpeg developers for consulting since several years and we also use SPI for many years.
It has always been difficult though to convince people to ask for money for development work from SPI. On top of that some people are quite aggressive if things are suggested to be done differently from how they envision it.
Now recently we where potentially offered a minimum 150k€ grant from the sovereign tech fund. Obviously this being FOSS a shitstorm of complaints started (from a small number of very loud people), people asked for it to be rejected because it was only 2 weeks time, people objected to it being through SPI, one person predicted that money discussions about the work on the mailing list would be a disaster prior to this now the same person tried to turn it into a disaster and doxed the developer who worked on making STF through SPI possible. Also SPI was working quite hard themselfs and with 0 payment to make it possible
We had to do a quick vote to verify that the overwhelming majority was in favor of moving forward with attempting to get the grant through SPI in February. Will we get the grant? We dont know yet. I imagine if the STF reads our mailing list discussions, then probably not ;)

Next problem was, that while many complained about financial sustainability, few actually added any proposal to the wiki to receive a part of the grant and only 2 developers actually submitted the needed SoW, iam being one, and really i only submitted SoWs so we can reach the minimum of 150k€. One guy on the wiki wanted to wait till the vote end before writing the SoW but then never did. Another never replied, yet another added an entry to the wiki after the deadline and also never submitted a SoW not even after the deadline. And the overwhelming majority of developers also reject offers for employment/work as they basically already have enough work and money and not enough time.
Money is one thing needed for sustainability, but its also not the only aspect. Both when people already have work they are not unhappy enough with or when there are things in a FOSS project they are unhappy with then money alone is not enough.

Where can we read more details about these lights ?
I mean seriously, if someone asked me for funding and says they need at minimum 2M$ id ask for a detailed list of what that is for.

That group of people has only one goal and that is to make money. In that sense they will certainly attempt to restrict every technology for others while keeping it as unrestricted as possible for their own company. I think trying to stop open source and free software is certainly something they all would love to achieve as it would eliminate many competitors. I dont think that they act in the best interrests of humankind.

If you are searching for something simple and secure, maybe a hardware password manager like mooltipass is an idea. Its not free because we dont have replicators yet, the hardware needs to be bought.

Its true, Binance customers shouldn't "need a forensic accountant to find where their money is"
But
No Bank customer should need a forensic accountant to find where their money is. Yet do you know where your money is that you deposited at your bank ?
The recent bank failures clearly show that money of customers wasnt where customers thought it was ...

"Fact Checking"?, The word you where searching for is "Censorship"

Yes and then we put their text in E-mails, feed their SQL to databases, feed their JS, Python, C and so on to compilers and run the excutables. Just ask yourself, if one with even just sub human intelligence AND the ability to talk to 7 billion people would not succeed in having one take arbitrary code and execute it.

I think its certain that there is and will be no barrier between a system like chatGPT and arbitrary code execution.

The question is

• what these systems will be capable of in the future (we do not know this).
• What exactly we will ask them to do. (we know this, and its probably everything that anyone wants, especially if money or power is involved)
• What will happen (we will see this)
• And if we can deal with it

Regulation and law will be ineffective and quite possibly make it worse as it would affect only some nations and some people. Try to avoid spam, greed, war, ... by law and regulation.

Lets see
If you remove all authors, no more books get created, thats bad.
If you remove all readers, no more books will be read, thats bad.
if you remove all publishers, no more lawsuits, thats ba... well, hmm, let me think ... i think something here is unneeded

Anyway i wish we would be able to pay Authors for their contribution fairly and not restrict who has access to it. Sadly the world still seems stuck on a system designed when copying was an expensive process

This one can be done with pencil and paper or a pocket calculator
sqrt(249919) = 499.91899 then round to next integer
sqrt(500*500 - 249919) = 9
your factors are 500 + 9 and 500 - 9 or 249919 = 509 * 491