Also the plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer. An informant brought it to the FBI's attention before the attempt was made, but it seems to have been a relatively serious conspiracy.

This stuff is not just talk.

This is an example of the broken windows theory from sociology (not to be confused with the broken window fallacy from economics), which states that if visible signs of low-level disorder (e.g. broken windows in unused buildings) are tolerated, then more serious forms of social disorder will occur as well.

This definitely holds in online fora. As the level of abuse you allow rises linearly, the abuse that occurs grows exponentially. Up to a point, I guess. Once you're 4chan there's just nowhere worse to go unless people start using your forum to explicitly plan and conduct crimes. But if you try to draw the line at "anything that isn't illegal is perfectly fine", your forum is going to get nasty. Slashdot addresses this with community moderation, but that only works as long as the community isn't too permissive. If Slashdot were to someday get its own Eternal September (not likely; /. is fading, not growing), it could become a cesspit in short order.

Well, and FWIW, there has been a huge increase in the number of
"security fixes" Debian has been downloading recently. I assume the same is true of other Linux distros and probably for Apple, though I don't think those are made public. Perhaps the BSDs haven't seen a large uptick.

I'd put this more strongly. AFAICT, and I've been involved in various privacy-sensitive international standards processes, Germany is the most privacy-protective jurisdiction in the world. In general, if you have a problem that creates a tension between privacy and enforcement, one of the best things you can do is go find out how Germany handles it. Their solutions aren't always good, but if you don't like their approach you're far more likely to walk away shaking your head at their excessive focus on privacy than the opposite.

Tokamaks also have no solution to the fast-neutron problem, which "embrittles" the core components of the reactor itself into powder over a few years of operation.

Only magnetized target fusion, like what General Fusion is pursuing, solves that problem.

I'm not sure that fusion will ever reach economic viability. But they're literally the only ones that even have a chance.

Interestingly, I remember at one time, the whole "Fake it until you make it." slogan meant something much less devious. It used to be a slogan people said about a small business managing to present itself as much bigger than it really was, while delivering on promises and work that would usually only be expected from a much larger business.

To me, that was actually a positive/good thing. It was your classic case of an over-achieving startup, doing more with less and winning outsized contracts that helped it grow to be a formidable competitor with the established players.

That's one perspective. Another is that while the US shouldered the cost of defense for much of the world, the US got a lot of goodwill for that, and that goodwill and other aspects of its reputation helped to build and extend a massive, decades-long economic expansion that outpaced the rest of the wealthy world. There's a good argument to be made that being the world's superpower was expensive, but came with an enormous ROI that justified every penny of it and more.

It also provided the more-concrete benefit that the western world bought a lot of their weapons from the US defense industry, which helped to keep it strong and able to provide US needs (somewhat... our actual defense manufacturing capability has been gradually eroding for a long time because Pax Americana was so strong that no one needed to expend our munitions at scale, so we lost the ability to build them at scale).

That's likely all gone now. Europe is re-arming, and they're not going to be buying American weapons if they can avoid it, because in part they're arming against us. The Greenland threats did not go unnoticed. Trump has turned us from a global, mostly beneficent superpower into a regional bully, able to push around the likes of Venezuela (though apparently not to cause a regime change), but struggling with a low-middling power like Iran.

Breaking GPS won't break digital maps. They'll still work just fine, and will be up to date. The devices just won't be able to identify your current location, you'll have to work that out from context, the way you do on a paper map.

Or not... our smart devices use other signals in addition to GPS, to help address the fact that GPS requires a relatively clear view of the sky, and that's not always available.

Circa 2010 I navigated halfway across the country using Google Maps running on an iPod Touch. The device didn't have a GPS receiver, but I didn't even realize that for quite a while because its database of known Wifi locations was able to give me reasonable location data most of the time. Once I understood that constraint I was able to use it quite effectively. I expect that the databases of fixed Wifi and BLE beacon locations have gotten much more extensive and effective over the last 15 years.

I inadvertently repeated the experiment about four years ago. I bought an iPad to use for navigation while sailing, not realizing that Apple only includes a GPS receiver in tablets that have a cellular modem. I spent a little time experimenting with the Navionics app on land, making sure it would work for me, and it worked just fine around town and even in the moderately-rural area where I live (I have to admit this testing was cursory). Then when I got a few miles offshore, the stupid thing stopped updating its location. I decided it must be faulty and switched to using the app on my Pixel phone to double-check my location, still using the iPad's larger screen for charts (including using the charts with azimuths to visible reference points to calculate my location -- a good habit when navigating in coastal waters, to maintain the skills).

When I got home I mentioned the situation to a friend who is a private pilot and uses an iPad for navigation while flying. He asked me whether my iPad had cellular data and explained that Apple uses a single-chip solution for GPSr and modem, so an Apple device has both or neither, and told me to exchange it for the more expensive iPad. I exchanged it for a Samsung tablet because it pissed me off that Apple would even make a smart device without a GPS receiver.

Anyway, my point is that if the GPS network went out, your digital navigation might not even notice for a while. And even if you lost location service entirely, you'd still have maps. Maybe if there's a massive EMP that knocks out all electronics you'll get use of your paper maps. Though you'll probably have to do it on foot or on a bicycle.

I took the financial hit years ago, when I resold my high-end configured Intel Macbook Pro to move to the M1.

As soon as I saw the benefits of the M series processors on the platform, I knew it was the way forward. The Intel Core i9 version of my Macbook Pro had overheating issues where it would throttle its performance down every time it did anything demanding for more than a few seconds at a time. That's just wasted performance at that point.

The battery life on M series is insanely good without feeling like you gave up any processing power at all, which sealed the deal for me.

The idea of Apple using Intel CPUs was always, in my opinion, kind of a hack on Apple's part. They realized IBM wasn't going to live up to their initial promises to keep innovating the "Power" CPU to keep it competitive. There wasn't any real alternative for Steve Jobs and company at that point. They were left "high and dry" unless they just ported everything to run on the same processor all the Windows computers were using.

The M series gets the Mac back to being truly unique again. You're not just buying another Windows laptop on the inside, wrapped in an "Apple shell".

And reading comprehension is not your strong suit.

My point was that the other part of your comment, "They just regurgitate random stuff they found on the Internet", is clearly false.

Once I see it doing what I want, I'll be interested. But in order to do that, it needs to be able to understand the action of the fiction I'm asking it to read. E.g. if it's reading "Alice in Wonderland" it needs to use a proper voice for Alice talking to herself as she falls down the rabbit hole. (And for the editorial comments interspersed.)

O,. and it needs to be able to do this without an internet connection.

"Lots" and "one that is widely accepted" are not the same thing at all, which is my point. There's no point in discussing intelligence without first nailing down which definition the interlocutors are using.

Also, nearly all of the definitions are extremely fuzzy.

Indeed.

The claim you made was not about whether machines can currently perform like a brain, nor about complexity. The claim you made is that the human brain cannot be simulated by a Turing machine, which is a much, much stronger claim.

So I repeat, why do you think that?

38 of the 50 US states are "one-party consent" states, which means that as long as one person present (e.g. the person wearing the glasses) is aware of the recording, it's legal. Roughly half of countries around the world either allow any party to a conversation to record it without telling the rest, or don't have any restrictions at all.

Since there's no clear definition of what "intelligent" means, much less one that is widely accepted, that's a pointless argument.