A side story here is that Iran, despite being a BRICS nation, would rather accept crypto than take payment in Yuan via CIPS. The clerics see how China has Russia over a barrel and don't want to end up there themselves.

This is horrifying, terrifying, and sadly well-known even to those who superficially monitor such things.

Popular media: More than one US film/tv studio has "lost" or "suffered a mysterious fire" in un-digitised archives, destroying the lot, during battles to preserve. The BBC sued Bob Monkhhouse for preserving material it destroyed. In Britain, it has been no better. Fans of the British TV series "The Avengers" can only see old episodes because armies of previous fans descended on rubbish tips and, at great risk to themselves, collected as much film as possible.

General history: Places like the John Ryland's Library and the British Library have suffered with rescuing archives at risk of becoming submerged or destroyed by mould. The Archimedes Palimpsest was partially destroyed by one collector filling in the pictures with coloured pens and by another collector allowing the book to be severely damaged by mould.

The National Archives have mysteriously "lost" a great many files over the years and are only digitising those they've retained at an incredibly slow rate. I know because I've personally forked out several hundred to get just two scanned, all because politicians far prefer frippery to archiving. We've absolutely no idea how many of the manuscripts held in other archives are still in usable condition because nobody bothers to check.

It's not just limited to archives, of course. The US has, over the last couple of decades, demolished numerous buildings within the US that are over 300 years old because malls produce profit and ancient structures don't. (They also then complain they have no history...) The Space Shuttle is to be taken to Texas for a PR stunt, which will require it being dismantled and those things aren't designed for that. There is no guarantee any of it will survive the journey. All because PR matters and preservation does not. Other countries? The Louvre... well... probably best not to talk about that utter disgrace. In Egypt, 3000 year old gold artefacts are routinely melted down so the conservators can pocket some extra cash.

It's at times like this that Kenny Everett's general comes to mind.

What China offers researchers isn’t big salaries. It’s research funding and the ability to just actually do R&D work instead of sitting at a desk writing grant applications. And China fast tracks human drug trials so researchers don’t have to spin their wheels waiting for approval to start testing. That said, Chinese universities and biotech companies do pay well by Chinese standards, so living well in modern city, unlike America’s crumbling disasters, is just a bonus.

...through fear-mongering and telling congress that people shouldn't have access to AI that OpenAI doesn't control.

Well, the obvious ones:

No built-in instruction-level or block-level parallelism
Array/vector operations are highly inefficient
Multiprocessing is pretty feeble
No CSP, you have to use OS primitives which are often unsafe
No formal contract system, best you can do is show statements don't do anything bad, you can't show functions do what you intend
Heavy software verification is difficult to impossible

That reminds me, I should really invent a language called "browns" so that Microsoft can put a # at the start.

I figured someone would bring up the myth of "the myth of talent". The art community is the absolute worst about this. To be good at art, you need both innate talent and practice. People who have that innate talent think that practice will get everyone there -- believe me, it doesn't. The reason you think it does is because of survivorship bias. Nobody asks me how I got to not be able to do anything art-wise except create copies of what I can see, so they don't ever find out that I practiced for decades and didn't get anywhere.

As it is, computers and programming are my skill, so I'm using that skill to generate art. Anybody who whines about me doing it that way is gatekeeping.

On the other hand, Microsoft trying to write an OS in Rust will reveal absolutely every defect present in the language.

Unless they write their own, which is quite likely as they'd rather have defects they can ignore.

These sorts of theatrics exactly.

...not because it does.

It's all about gatekeeping the skill, time, and budget floor and propping up the wall between "producers" and "consumers". I worked hard to get where I am, therefore it shouldn't be made easier. I worked hard to make $20/hour, therefore we shouldn't raise the minimum wage. Etc.

The reason there aren't legions and legions of programmers protesting AI on twitter is because programmers are accustomed to change and we've learned to embrace it, yet every time there's a technology that changes how art is made (cameras, digital painting, 3d rendering, even pre-made pigments), there are a group of artists who flip their shit and say that the new technology is going to kill creativity and ruin art as we know it, then fifty years later all of the things that those people insisted are "not art" are in museums and art history books.

I hope a company in China gets ahold of the database and trains a good music generator AI on it and releases it for free.

Smart devices have been spying on you for years now. Don't buy a fridge that spies on you.

Abandon hope, all ye who press enter here.

Now, yes, there are predictions that you could get a supermassive black hole launched into space, especially during a galaxy merger if the velocity of the smaller black hole exceeds the escape velocity of the combined galaxy.

But I'd be wary of assuming that it's a launched black hole, unless we can find the merger it comes from. There may be ways for such a black hole to form that cause the stars to be launched away rather than the black hole being flung, and if a galaxy isn't rotating fast enough to be stable, one could imagine that a sufficiently small galaxy was simply consumed by its central black hole. Both of these would seem to produce exactly the same outcome, if all we have is the black hole itself and a velocity.

I'm not going to say either of these is likely in this case, or that astronomers haven't examine them (they almost certainly have), but rather that we should be cautious until we've a clearer idea of what the astronomers have actually been able to determine or rule out.

You dont make multiplayer games for a living. Please stop talking, it's embarassing ... for you.