"Nature Is Still Molding Human Genes" doesn't need to be interpreted in an anthropomorphising way, any more than "Strong winds are still blowing people's roofs off". Just because a verb is used doesn't imply anthropomorphising.

To add a detail to an earlier comment. I often naively assume that humans are still largely adapted biologically to living in small isolated tribes, as we did for many many millennia prior to the growth of civilisation. When civilisation kicks off, we start helping each other survive, and the actual nature of civilisation often presents too fast a moving target for evolution to accurately track. So I assume that many of our innate traits, especially when it comes to basics like food, sex, and survival in the face of threats, are still largely those we had as pre-civilisation humans.

I know this is naive, but I wonder just how far from the mark it is, why, and what the scientific evidence actually shows about this.

I always thought that since we help people survive who would have died out in pre-civilisation conditions, that this effect would blunt the edge of natural selection. (I stand corrected.) But if only we could breed out traits like selfishness and greed.

It will be a case of scroll for the legal limit of pages (say 4), and then there'll be a "due to UK legislation you need to refresh to see more content" as a clickable link, so they click that and, yay, 4 more pages to scroll.

What will happen at some point is that sites that require age verification will require some kind of verifiable token generate by the OS-level age verification. Rather than the myriad proliferating independent age verfication. But it's a legislative ratchet that is unlikely to move in the opposite direction. If you don't want OS level age verification, then likely you'll be confined to the part of the internet that doesn't require age verification.

It's time to sit back and watch a good old game of Whack-a-Mole. Even if Anthropic is successful at taking down the actual source code, most of the people who would want to study it already have it. And they can gently explore the boundaries of what they can communicate without Anthropic being able to do anything about it.

Because laws have been passed that require it. The problem isn't the OS vendor, it's the law. Any commercial backer of a distro that doesn't comply is, in one way or another, complicit in breaking those laws. Many backers will withdraw support in that scenario. So basically it will come down to community forks and patches that the official distros avoid condoning. Probably it won't simply be a case of 'store date of birth in user database' in future, rather they'll have a government ordained supplier of age verification and you have to store some kind of cryptographic token that ties a user account to their official proof of age. Then browsers will be required to present something based on this token to websites. It's gonna get more 1984 as things go on. But Linux distros aren't in a position to oppose this.

And of course that Mac Pro idea was killed by the cosmic trashcan thing. In a sense what one wants is a kind of 'docking tower' into which a Mac Studio fits, giving a lot of expansion. If you want a machine with 3 SSDs and 4 HDDs, you have to put up with crazy sprawl with modern macs. With an old school tower with it all contained inside, you had a single box you could pick up, carry around, and just plug in.

Most software and music piracy is done using the Windows OS. Most of that is running either on CPUs by Intel or AMD. Are Microsoft, Intel, or AMD, complicit in this piracy given that their products are used for it?

The ruthless selfishness of many billionaires and a certain POTUS are far more deserving of the term 'moral decay' than what goes on on OF. But when it comes to denouncing 'moral decay', people tend to look the other way unless and until something naughty comes along, then out come the condemnation and the pitchforks.

All too often, humans fall into the "thinking without thinking" trap, just regurgitating their inputs rather than actually understanding them. Understanding the failings of AI and how it doesn't think, but rather pattern matches like a super search engine, will probably shed light onto many problems relating to humans and genuine understanding vs regurgitating input.

While delusional thinking is common to religions and especially cults, provided you do the thing religious conservatives hate and actually think through your religious faith, those problems can be avoided. But crafting a sensible, rational, and informed religious faith is a much harder task than a mindlessly religiously conservative one. Thus ease, convenience, and human laziness lead to the latter propagating. But those dynamics are a consequence of human nature: the problems of religions happen because religions are made out of people. Those problems are as inevitable as weeds growing in the garden, and the problem is that the lazy gardener will simply declare the weeds God's chosen flowers and thus don't needed to be weeded out. And not having a religious faith is not necessarily a good solution for those for whom their faith provides central structural components of their mental makeup. It is easy to be simplistic about religion and faith, some declare it absolutely true beyond question (esp. religious conservatives), and others declare it unquestioningly delusional. Both sides associate mainly with those who agree with them, and so anti-religion quasi-cults form, built on the same human dynamics that power religious cults and echo chambers. Humans are complex, complexity is a b****, and we are easily seduced by things purported to take that complexity away.

It's like the way being surrounded by sycophants fuels a dictator's delusions. The first golden rule of using AI is that you must, must, must, verify what they say, and you must therefore have a means to verify what they say. If not, then the unit comprising of you and them turns into an AI feeding itself its own output, and model collapse occurs (or at least something like model collapse). On the human side this manifests as delusional thinking, since the garbage output of a model-collapsed AI has been burned into their brain.

There's a lot I do that doesn't require much CPU power, but for which battery life is important. Stuff that runs happily on a Lenovo T420 under Linux (Chrome with unbloated web pages, terminal, vim). The battery life and power consumption will be insanely low compared to a PC laptop. For stuff on the go that can be massive. (My current solution is a T450 with a pile of spare batteries.) I would love one of these running a Debian Linux with KDE frontend, but could cope with Macos for the sake of reliability and battery life.

First nomination for the 2026 Do Bears S*** In The Woods Awards.