Also, anything sounds big when you put it in gallons. Doesn't sound so big when you mention that's 92 acre feet, the amount used by less than 20 acres / 8 hectares of alfalfa per year. Or when you mention that a typical *closed loop* 1GW nuclear reactor uses 6-20 billion gallons of cooling water per year (once-through uses 200-500 billion gallons, though most of that is returned, whereas closed loop evaporates it)

I don't think it has anything to do with that. As soon as I saw the headline, my mind went "cohort study". And sure enough, yeah, it's a cohort study. Remember that big thing about how wine improves your health, and then it turned out to just be that people who drink wine tend to be wealthier and thus have better health outcomes? And also, the "sick quitter" effect, where people who are in worse health would tend to stop drinking, so you ended up with extra sick people in the non-wine group? Same sort of thing. This study says they're controlling for a wide range of factors, but I'd put money on it just being the same sort of spurious correlations.

"I just put my models on a usb drive then plug said drive into the printer."

You must have a lot of spare time on your hands.

"It works great locally" - Um, no it doesn't?

They've made a nice easy-to-use ecosystem. For $400 you can get a P1S that supports adding an AMS, auto bed leveling, enclosed-chamber printing, high precision, high print speeds, and 300/100C nozzle/plate temps, and has an easy cloud print service and a robust ecosystem of models you can just download and print with no extra config straight from the app.

But yeah, their behavior is increasingly entering bad-actor territory. I wonder how long it'll be before they lock entry-level printers into their branded filament?

You've proven you don't understand what you read, so whatever. ~ shrugs ~

Here's your Internet point, little troll.

It strikes me that putting a product name inside source code under GPL license -- which explicitly encourages modification and distribution of source code -- should constitute abandonment of U.S. trademark. However, a California District Court ruled against that logic in Neo4j v. PureThink. It seems GPL needs to explicitly address trademarks, such as right to say "fork of X" -- akin to how it had to address the patent issue.

That AI slop article forgot to provide the "free fall" part: "Compared with 2000, in 2024 Japan is ranked 4th out of 182 by GDP (down from 2nd), 35th by GDP per capita (down from 4th), and 37th by GDP per capita PPP (down from 24th)."

Sorry, but your trolling doesn't work. There was no "-ism" based on "races" as you and I understand this word before this understanding existed. Be as it may, that link is my final contribution on this subtopic with you. It's on you whether you stick with fantasy or learn reality.

That's what Japan is doing. It isn't working well. The main reason is that the people with decision making power in this scenario are all elders, meaning they share a pro-stagnation sociological profile. Fear of changes, basically. But changes keep happening regardless, which fragilizes the whole thing.

The linked article itself refers to the discussions about this. The academic consensus is that it definitely influenced the later development of racism proper as modernly understood, but saying it was racism doesn't fit, since it's based on Christian-based considerations about how (presumed) original sin interacts with the (presumed) deicide curse, these two with the (presumed) cleansing brought about by baptism, these three seen through the lens of a (presumed) propensity or lack thereof to political treason, and other similar nonsense, all linked a lot of other stuff mixing religon and politics. So it qualifies at best as pre-racism, and is within the scope of my first paragraph.

Quantity vs quality, in this case, is a false dichotomy. Curves of scientific-technological developments measured by, for example, patent filings over the centuries, track global population size. The reason for this is that the larger the population, the more people with talent for scientific and technological research are born, the more means they have to dedicate themselves to such pursuits due to economies of scale, and the larger the pool of extremely high-IQ individuals within this subset of the population who're responsible for the discoveries with the highest impact, all due to the long tails of the different normal distributions associated with these traits. Any downward change to these parameters will result in a slowdown of discoveries, which will in turn will result in a reduction in technological development, which in turn will result in economic stagnation, producing a vicious spiral.

There are, evidently, other factors involved, such as political and economic models that favor or hinder such developments. But these, too, are a factor of population size. A shrinking population results in disproportionately large pressure, by those who want to maintain their standard of living, in favor of strong policies enforcing the short-term status quo for themselves, with disregard for long-term effects, see e.g. Japan and South Korea. This kind of status quo-maintaining effort is almost invariably detrimental to novel scientific research, since it favors, at best, iterative improvement of what's already well-known, not actual novelty. So the problem is compounded.

The world may still manage to find an alternative model for producing a long tail of high-IQ individuals with the means to continue generating exponentially growing novelty research, but, right now, no such model exists, and expecting one to arise just because, out of the blue, over the next few decades, is part of the wishful thinking mentality I referred to before.

Before that, there were forms of discrimination based on ethnicity and religion, but not any kind of grouping of different ethnic groups under broad general categories based on their skin color. For example, a French person might deeply dislike an English person and consider them inferior, or a European Christian might consider an also European Jewish person inferior, that kind of thing.

The larger groupings we hear about nowadays came from what's now called the "New Biology" of the 18th century, which had started to catalog plants, animals, and people due to similarities and differences in their phenotypes. Skin color was a very clear phenotypical category for humans under that cataloging perspective. And it quickly got linked with other discourses, these political, that had started emerging a while before, in the 16th and 17th centuries, about national identities, colonial right of conquest, administrative organization of imperial conquests, and similar stuff, so it spread fast over the next few decades.

In the early 19th century, the whole thing had trickled from the elites down into the common people, and racism as we currently understand it went mainstream.

A fascinating detail in all this is that, when racism began spreading, it was opposed by most conservatives of the time, and embraced only by the then progressives due to being seen as modern and scientific, unlike the religious mumbo jumbo the conservatives believed in. As the saying goes, all that's needed for a progressive to become a conservative is to continue believing the same things as time passes, so when a 21st-century reactionary conservative defends racist ideas, he's being an 18th-century progressive whom an 18th-century actual conservative would most definitely look down at.

Immigration has precisely the purpose to keep the population growing and the economy with it. Without it, the economy stagnates and begins to shrink. Countries have to pick one of these options:

* Economic growth through higher birth rates.
* Economic growth through higher immigration.
* Economic shrinkage.

There's no known fourth option. There are some hypothetical alternatives based on wishful thinking. If a country tries one of these and it fails, it'll experience economic contraction exactly as if it had actively opted for it.

I provide more details in this other reply..