> America agreed to defend them in the case of a Russian invasion.
Read the treaty, that's just not true. America agreed to consult with other nations. The billions of dollars of aid given went far beyond that promise.

Does it matter whether they're doing it for medals, points or just their paycheck? Should soldiers never want to kill the enemy? This is war. People die. You TRY to kill people, that's how you accomplish your goals. Yes, it's horrific. What do you expect, bouquet-making contests?

Isn't it rich? Are we a pair? Playing with egg and pipettes on a dare? Send in the clones.

Isn't it bliss? Don't you approve? One edits genes, and one who can't move. Where are the clones? Send in the clones.

Just when I'd stopped Cracking the shell, Finally mapping The code that I fell. Building my genes, Shaping a life. Telameres in a spiral, Something's not right.

Don't you love farce? My fault, I fear. Gave you perfection, No flaws to steer. But where are the clones? There ought to be clones. Quick, send in the clones.

What a surprise, Who could foresee? I'd come to change what they'd come to be. Isn't it rich? Isn't it queer? Facing the code, This dream we steer. But where are the clones? There ought to be clones. Well, maybe next year.

As another example, sometimes a genetically-influenced mental trait can be good in one environment and problematical in another. For example:
https://www.psychologytoday.co...
        "One source of such variation in adaptive stability is surely genetic difference among infants, but genes alone do not make a child an orchid or a dandelion. As work by other researchers has shown, the genetic characteristics of children create their predispositions, but do not necessarily determine their outcomes. For example, a consortium studying Romanian children raised in horribly negligent, sometimes cruel orphanages under the dictatorship of Nicolae CeauÅYescu, before his fall in 1989, discovered that a shorter version of a gene related to the neurotransmitter serotonin produced orchid-like outcomes. Children with this shorter allele (an alternative form of a gene) who remained in the orphanages developed intellectual impairments and extreme maladjustment, while those with the same allele who were adopted into foster families recovered remarkably, in terms of both development and mental health.
        Similarly, a team of Dutch researchers studying experimental patterns of children's financial donations--in response to an emotionally evocative UNICEF video--found that participants with an orchid-like dopamine neurotransmitter gene gave either the most charitable contributions or the least, depending upon whether they were rated securely or insecurely attached to their parents--that is, depending on factors that were not genetic."

So, potentially parents can select, say, for children who may be less likely to get depressed or miserly in bad circumstances, but you will also select out children who might excellent or generous in good circumstances.

More examples: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=the+...

Other ideas include "tulip" children:
https://nurtureandthriveblog.c...

Is it ironic or intentional that the company has "orchid" in the name?

But if it's all the same to you, I'll have the soup.

Hitler was no spectacular physical specimen. More like a sickly little wimp.

But then see Mussolini, Stalin, Putin, Hirohito, etc. Moral of the story: don't select short leaders.

It's retro. Some people like the old way. I get i.

Default to Serif fonts when? I'm getting tired of the ends of character strokes chipping when the rendering engine's stone masons carve them.

Very few businesses that are involved in IT in any way have anything remotely close to decent security.

Basically, they need to reintroduce the US' Internet Czar, who should have meaningful authority and who should impose meaningful IT security standards. That small companies can't afford to hire security staff is irrelevant as they mostly either work in the cloud using SAAS, at which point their provider should be handling all the security. If you want to roll your own, then you should accept the burden of paying for adequate security. Minimum standards apply to just about everything else in life, and I'd rate getting IT security right just a little bit more important than getting cars to not roll over (you can usually survive a roll) or preventing toasters from spontaneously combusting (you can park electrical appliances away from flammable stuff).

You can avoid catastrophes with defective appliances but you can't avoid catastrophes with defective IT systems.

Hey! At least it's a start.

https://newpublic.org/
"Reimagine social media: We are researchers, engineers, designers, and community leaders working together to explore creating digital public spaces where people can thrive and connect."

Their Digital Spaces Directory listing hundreds of alternative platforms (including Slashdot):
https://newpublic.org/study/33...
"As the social media landscape changes and a new wave of digital spaces emerges, this Directory is meant to be a resource for our field -- a jumping-off-point for further exploration and research for anyone who's interested in studying, building, stewarding, or simply using digital social platforms. We hope this will inspire creative exploration, spark new collaborations, and highlight important progress."

Ultimately though, standards (open protocols, of which there are many good examples better than Bitcoin, like, say, email RFC 5322) are probably more important that implementations for distributed social media. I gave a five minute lightning talk about that for LibrePlanet 2022:
"Free/Libre Standards for Social Media and other Communications"
https://pdfernhout.net/media/l...

The text of the talk in IBIS outline format is available here:
https://pdfernhout.net/librepl...

From there:

What are key insights for moving forward?

        * Standards unify; incompatible services fragment
        * The power of plain text
        * Simple Made Easy ( Rich Hickey https://www.infoq.com/presenta... )
        * A democratic government is a special case of a free/libre software community

What are current free alternatives?

        * Matrix.org
        * GNU social
        * Mastodon
        * Mattermost (can import from Slack)
        * Wordpress + plugins
        * Drupal + plugins
        * Nextcloud
        * Email with better clients and servers including using JMAP, Nylas, mailpile etc
        * IRC with better clients
        * Smallest Federated Wiki (Ward Cunningham)
        * Citadel
        * Kolab
        * Diaspora
        * A plain website of text files using Git
        * Twirlip (my own experiments, very rough)
        * Many others

What are problems with free alternatives?

        * Usually more about implementations than standards
        * Hard to start using
        * Fragmentation of user bases with walled gardens
        * Often not federated
        * May not scale (like to trillions of messages)
        * Design missing the big messaging picture (e.g. whether email can be used to edit wikis)

What is my guess at what the future holds for innovation in messaging?
        * Free/Libre standards that unify messaging, with free implementations (a social semantic desktop?)
        * Obligatory XKCD on "How Standards Proliferate": https://xkcd.com/927/
        * It is the social consensus issues that are hard at this point, not the technical ones
        * We need less, not more: less standards, less code, less features, less division & stupidity
        * We need better: better standards, better code, better features, better peacemaking & sensemaking

The claim that donor mitochondriaâ(TM)s DNA is âoeinsignificantâ is like calling the foundation of a house trivial because itâ(TM)s underground. Mitochondrial DNA is the foundation of metabolism. These genes donâ(TM)t shape eye color or height, but their mutations can trigger catastrophic conditions. Hardly insignificant when theyâ(TM)re the difference between vitality and devastation.

This is a remarkable leap. Critics raising alarms about future generations shouldn't be regulated to playing Cassandra. Mitochondrial DNA, passed matrilineally, could carry subtle effects we wonâ(TM)t see for generations. Weâ(TM)re rewriting the cellâ(TM)s engine manual. While the results are promising, humility demands we acknowledge the complexity of meddling with lifeâ(TM)s oldest blueprint.

The commenter clearly seemed to think the world was going to be supremely unfair to the CEO (turns out 'exec' is ambiguous, as the man, his wife, the mistress, and the mistress' husband are all executives one place or another). You said the exec deserves to lose because of his actions, which seems to be inconsistent. The commenter's stance is based on his blatant assumption that the wife was not earning money and the mistress was just some gold digger, and that even if the wife wasn't earning money, that if the split happens it's unfair for her to get a cut of the CEOs wealth that he earned.

The assertions of misogyny are because he filled in the gaps he didn't know with assumptions consistent with negative stereotypes of women in these situations. He jumped right to the fiction of the struggling man paying huge alimony to some indolent ex-wife living a life of luxury. That the mistress was only in it for gold
digging.

You seem to have just been hit with the headlines and manufactured a scenario where he is a rich guy married to a stay at home wife, with a gold digging mistress.

My spouse was interested enough to bother to dig in and the reality is that the CEO, the wife, the mistress, and the mistress' husband are all four rich with income, so alimony is likely not even a factor. Similarly, the assets being split is unlikely to be lopsided.

From what I've seen in actual life, that all seems to be a rich person trope, and an exaggeration. Those I've known with modest lifestyles that get divorced seem not to have encountered a whole lot of financial duress due to that (maybe child support, but not the wife). I was at a business lunch where three people started bemoaning this as if it were true, that their former spouses are just draining them of all their cash. However, one of them had just been talking about his brand new BMW M5 that his 'lame' former wife would never let him buy and another chimed in with the same experience, albeit with a more humble Kia Stinger. Broadly they all seemed to be doing quite well and the wife would have otherwise been stuck high and dry largely at their "man of their house" mindset that didn't have her earn an income, which is fine, but expect them to be able to use some of your income even after the relationship falls apart.

Maybe it's less about the 'AI' and more about the 'slop'. Just like mobile games are flooded with slop, even before AI.