Perhaps their energies have waned with time? Three wishes on the lamp, that sort of thing? Still, you are right to suggest caution until we know. :-)

I never said they should be having sex. I said they frequently do have sex despite best parental efforts. A good parent has contingency plans in place in case their best efforts fail. It doesn't matter whether you think the sex is a good idea or not, the vaccine for HPV is still a good idea! Just because they've been vaccinated does not change whether or not they're going to have sex.

If Boomers are responsible for teenage promiscuity, we may have to give them credit for a lot more things, such as sunlight and gravity. If they were able to reorder the world that much, there's no telling what they did with their powers before we were born!

It's bad for individuals, clearly. For species biology, it has been incredibly positive, which accounts for the incredible drive in young humans to copulate widely (the more diverse the pairings, the broader the genetic spread, which reproduces more of that genome into the next generation). Whether or not it is good for society is an open question with a lot of varying data. Planned children is clearly a positive -- but with modern birth control and abortion access, that's less of a gain. The extraordinary repressive controls needed to enforce monogamy overriding the biological imperative are definitely negative. The open questions are around emotional stability of adults, and we really have few societies with enough open poly families to do good studies. But it is an interesting area to research.

The reason AIs are coherent at all is because they're trained on input that did come from intelligent minds. The AIs ingest and rearrange the text. The mind we imagine behind the text should be a collective mind, not an individual one. Such a collective may abstractly care about me but does not know me specifically, and does not care about me specifically. Mentally inserting the word "probably" at the start of every AI output sentence will help us all balance how much we can lean on the output vs not.

Now we just have the problem of parents blocking the vaccine because they claim it promotes promiscuity. A huge number of parents do not want their daughters getting the vaccine at age 12-18 because they just can't admit that their daughters might have sex in that range. I don't know how we get past that mental block.

Part of the ARAG strike was the argument that artists never signed away the rights to reproduce their voices and likenesses for eternity, even when they signed for a particular project (e.g. motion capture for a specific movie). That applies to FX artists as well. So even when these films were made "work for hire", was it really intended to be used like this? Not from the artists' POV it definitely was not. None of them would have signed a contract that permitted this. And the argument is that whatever copyrights were signed over for the existing movies cannot cover something that no reasonable signer of the contract would have expected it to cover. Some of the more recent movies, maybe, since those were more imaginitive "all technologies into the future" contracts, but definitely not the older-than-about-Y2K contracts.
Regardless, the artists believe the movie makers should refrain from doing it because it is to them deeply unethical, regardless of its legality.

The argument is that how the training is done makes this new and different from CGI. LLM output isn't some clever programming someone wrote based on math they thought up. It is deep analysis of every available archive to reproduce mechanically what was done by hand. The argument is that LLMs learning from the available works is a violation of copyright when that LLM is then used to generate new work that displaces the artists whose work was used in the input. It's definitely new. It's definitely not a legal violation as law is currently written. It's definitely hurting existing artists. It's definitely opening up new ways of creating for non-artists. It's definitely got unanswered questions all over it. And we definitely need to have a discussion as a society and as a legal system about what we think is right for these tools. None of that was true of CGI. :-)

My need not to be shot by a drone my code helps run is hardly an overreach of arrogance. And it is why I do not contribute my robotics work to open source.

What do you mean? What entitlement is there in saying I do not wish to participate in a given activity?

If the TX governor calls a special session then Legislature can also override. This technique has been used in the past: 1. pass a bill the governor will veto but 2. fail to pass something that the governor really wants. Governor calls special session. Wait for governor to issue veto on the first bill. Then override veto and then pass the second bill that the governor really wanted. It forces a "if you want yours, you have to allow ours" situation.

Unfortunately, we give approval to all uses of our software when we publish it as open source. This is one of the greatest unsolved problems of open source: licensing it for specific uses only and having a kill switch if that is violated. It crops up first when we say "non-commercial use only", but keeps coming up when we hit uses for war or doxxing or any other thing for which you think, "Hey, I didn't want that to be used that way." The only recourse is to only publish non-open software where they need a continuous license that you can revoke. Think John Deere.

There's no good solutions here.

I found zero instances on Fox News of them ever covering the story. I found local Fox affiliates covering the accusation for the first time in April of this year, and only one story, easily missed if you did not watch that day. Given that 30% of US populace receives news only from Fox and related media, I find it extremely plausible not to have heard the accusations against Starbucks. Broadening my search, I found most major media covered it at most once in the last year. It is the kind of story only heard by those who monitor the news daily, unlike Ukraine or Gaza that are in the news cycle regularly. It is harder for me to evaluate how far that story (or any story!) has spread in social media, but it appears to be very much within limited distribution.

News penetration is not deep in USA unless there is a specific trigger event, and supply chain sourcing is a slow burn story.

I have asked at clothing stores: few patrons know anything about source of materials. Many have never even heard there is an issue. I have never tested this at Starbucks but would not surprise me if the vast vast majority of patrons have never thought to ask behind the scenes of supply chains.

No problem. :-)