So Canonical has broken a bunch of functionality that used to work perfectly well in older Ubuntu versions. Do they focus on fixing it? Do they instead add new functionality to make things more user-friendly and generally better? No, they change sudo, which works absolutely fine, at least I've never had a single problem with, to its rewrite in Rust. Because it's a cool new thing.

Honestly, up until recently Ubuntu was the default Linux distro for me, now I'm not so sure. It's not an option to replace it right now at work, but if that option becomes available I'll certainly be exploring alternatives.

And you could do the exact same thing with a password. Because pin is password but with maybe less complexity requirements. Otherwise, it's still a string of characters entered into a password field.

For those ocassions when you have to fight a giant alien reptile hand-to-hand of course. Like this.

You have all this horrible Orwellian surveillance going on with these companies trying to find everything about you down to your last bowel movement, and for what? So I can get an email 'hey, we noticed you've recently bought a dishwasher, do you want to buy another one? For, you know, your dishwasher collection?' How does knowing which colour my neighbour's jacket is help them sell more of whatever shit they're selling?

At least the idea of a repressive totalitarian government using mass surveillance to quash any dissent, while of course evil, makes sense for said totalitarian government. I don't see how this does. Although I remember reading stories of police buying biometric data from private companies for their policing purposes. So maybe Orwell's original vision is starting to come true after all, albeit in a roundabout way.

Totally agree with the overall gist that people should take a deep breath and think before posting yet more hyperbolic kneejerk commentary. But I do take issue with this:

For certain jobs this is very true, but for others, not really. Take a sculptor, for example. Their answer to the question would be "I worked on my sculpture all of last week. And that, four more times." Same thing for a writer writing a novel, same thing for a scientist trying to get the math for some complex theory to add up, same for a sprinter training for the Olympics. This is a typical corporate thing of trying to come up with simple, easily quantifiable and straightforward enough for senior management to understand definitions for any complex question, such as defining productivity.

I suppose the hypothetical sculptor could restate their answer to someting like "First thing, I worked on the nose of my statue, second, on the ears, third, on the fingers..." Might be a bit more difficult for the scientist or the athlete, but there should probably be some way to define the thing you're doing in terms of five distinct activities. But here you're already put into the position where you have to gamify your answer to comply with nonsensical demands, in other words, play politics instead of just doing your job.

This isn't about reading the copyrighted material, it's about what you do with it once you've read it. A lot of copyright licenses allow you to freely read/view the text but don't allow you to sell it for profit as your own, or require you to post attribution to the original author. If you're writing a scientific paper and in your research you use papers written by others, you add citations so that people can find the original research. Copyright owners can add all kinds of special restrictions of where the works they own can be used. For example see the cases where music rights holders have objected to their music being used at particular political events.

A number of people here said things to the effect that whatever a person can do with a copyrighted work, AI should be able to do the same. I don't see why this should be the case. The ultimate goal of making laws is regulating society so that the lives of the people improve. We should ask ourselves if what they're calling AI actually provides a benefit to society, outside of a new narrow exceptions. If we decide this isn't the case, it's absolutely appropriate to impose whatever additional copyright restrictions on AI's access to works we feel are necessary, up to and including prohibiting access to those works altogether.

For once the font page is not filled with articles about Trump, so these people are clearly getting desperate for an outlet.

So would most other countries in existence. It's not a good definition. Major parts of Fascism are also nationalism, authoritarianism/totalitarianism and militarism. These parts probably seemed too obvious to mention to Mussolini.

Let's take the scenario of home care, the demand for which is bound to keep increasing as population gets older. A single multipurpose robot works much better than a multitude of specialised dumb machines which very old people may have problems operating. Humanoid shape works pretty well. Working in a house roughly humanoid size probably works best, since you'd want these things to fit through doors, but also be able to open them and do things like retrieve items from top shelf of fridge/cupboard. Arms are useful for all kinds of things, maybe not with five fingers or opposable thumbs but are still very versatile and useful tools. Many industrial completely non-humanoid robots have 'arms'. Torso works well as a user inteface/status display. Legs may be less useful, but wheels / tracks have some weaknesses, a lot more difficult to get up / down the stairs or into a storage cupboard with wheels or tracks. Also, getting into tight spaces (crawl mode). Not sure what would be the best way to solve this from an engineering point of view. Head doesn't seem very useful, but you may as well put something that looks like a head on top to get a more humanoid look. Morale is also a factor, I'd imagine many old people would find it more enjoyable to be taken care of by something that at least looks a bit like a human.

Idioracy was set 500 years in the future. Looks like it was far too optimistic - we're getting there way ahead of schedule.

We're getting into sweeping generalizations involving many millions of people here, but I think there are pros and cons in both approaches. The whole commonsense, keep it simple, stupid, if it ain't broke don't fix it approach is good for making sure you don't do anything really dumb, but there's a danger of it leading to stagnation. Sometimes fixing something that isn't broken can be good if you improve it in the process. It's a question of finding the right balance.

But with America, to get there in the first place you had to get on a ship and leave everything you knew behind in hope of striking it rich in a place you knew little about. So being an optimist and believing in miracles was sort of a starting filter for anyone who got there. Of course there were also people who were there originally, and people who didn't get there by choice, but you know what I mean. Things of course changed over time but some of that initial optimism had to still be a part of the culture.

On average, women are exactly as smart as men of course. But apparently the IQ distribution curve is flatter for men than for women, that is, there are more outliers for men than for women. So, men have more geniuses, but also more morons. From personal experience, I can believe that.

That's probably just the usual hyperbole, that people literally do not want their children to know that gay people exist because they're all bigots and nazis and have a shrine to Goebbels in their bedroom or whatever. Rather than, the 'LGBTQetc' content is often very political and people will want to keep children who at a young age lack the capacity to fully appreciate all the political nuances away from programming which may try to brainwash them into any particular ideology. From reading some of the discussion on the internet (including this forum), being indoctrinated into the woke ideology will really mess with your head, far far worse than any pornographic or violent content. So I'd very much support giving this stuff the highest ratings possible.

You can't have a controlled polulation reduction unless you start implementing something like China's one child policy, which is only possible in an authoritarian country like China - in a democratic country this is a complete non-starter. Even China has now abandoned this policy, after the significant damage it's done to its economy. In first world countries, the only thing you can do to reduce population is impose stricter immigration controls (which is what Trump is doing now btw). Even in this case, you're only reducing population in your country, the potential immigrants are still there, they'll just end up having kids somewhere else. Actually, if people stay in poorer countries instead of immigrating, they're likely to have more kids, thus increasing the overall population.

Shrinking and ageing population does not immediately lead to an economic crisis, it would be a very gradual process. Japan is a very stable society with an advanced economy, it would take a lot to bring it down. Besides, as far as I'm aware, Japan's population is still growing, even though the increase is extremely small and will reverse soon. You can be pretty certain though that Japanese government is very concerned with the demographic situation - afaik they're starting to allow more immigration into the country, something they've been very reluctant to do in the past for cultural reasons.

My experience has been that Ubuntu is still a pretty solid distribution but it's steadily getting worse. I work with two Ubuntu machines. In the older version, everything pretty much just works. The latest version otoh, while by and large it works OK more and more issues are turning up, like problems with external USB drives, headphones no longer working, strange spikes in CPU usage, ocassional login problems, etc. Sometimes you can work around those by writing shell scripts which sometimes sort of make things better, but other times there isn't much you can do. I'm having to use the older machine for certain things now. Ubuntu is probably still one of the more stable distros out there, but it seems to be getting less and less stable.

And yes, with so many Linux distros out there, people will just start switching to different ones. For a while Ubuntu has been seen as the default 'user-friendly' distribution, it may start losing that repuration now.